Courtesy Peters Projects
From Machina: Past, Present, Future, find futuristic projections from Peter Sarkisian.
If you're a little nervous to check out gallery openings at Peters Projects, you're not alone. The space, which previously housed Gerald Peters Gallery before it became the edgier, younger-feeling Peters Projects, has very hallowed-ground vibes. This Friday heralds a sprawling group of openings, some of which contain multiple artists. For director Mark Del Vecchio, who took the reins from Eileen Braziel earlier this year, it's got obvious appeal.
"What's not to like?" he asks SFR. "The gallery is a massive space; one of the largest privately owned galleries in the country." Del Vecchio says it's a cavernous area—about 8,500 square feet—so why not fill it? Explaining the seemingly mixed-bag grouping, he adds, "I inherited some partially curated exhibitions that were already in place, combined with the schedule of exhibitions I had been working on."
Along with his partner Garth Clark, Del Vecchio is a major force in the world of contemporary ceramic art, but he doesn't want to be pigeonholed. "I am also an 'art person' who has been around all types of art for most of my life," he says. "Ceramics have been good to me and I will always champion them." If you're like me and even looking at a porcelain vase makes you pretty sure you'll accidentally knock it over, Del Vecchio says it might not be the best option for you. "But," he adds, "you'll be missing out on something special."
Take Tony Marsh's American Moon Jars, for example. Gray-toned ceramics the texture and color of a section of pale aspen, but covered with shelf-like steps, which serve as platforms for chunks of pyrite, quartz and other natural stones. Other work in his Crucibles series is ceramic, but looks like something dredged up from the ocean, covered in gnarled, calcified bubbles.
Hank Saxe's stoneware sculptures (there are 10 in all) are less, shall we say, approachable. "Untitled #7" is a hunk of shiny, silver-colored fired clay, with a hole at its center from which molten-looking gold oozes downward. For lack of a more sophisticated description, it's kinda gross.
The group show Inner Vision is the most classically styled exhibition of the five, which makes sense: Del Vecchio tells SFR that it "required some dips into the 'vaults' of the Gerald Peters inventory" to retrieve works by Santa Fe Art Colony painters Jozef Bakos and Willard Nash. The show also includes a handful of other artists, some local, some not, and explores how self-portraiture has changed over the years due to increased self-analysis and new possibilities for expression. It's a fabulous concept which, with the addition of a handful more artists, could easily be a stand-alone show. Celebrated Canadian artist Kent Monkman, whose huge paintings typically require the work of small teams of painters, contributed five much more intimate self-portraits. Also included are Kukuli Velarde, Angela Fraleigh, Daniel Sprick, Will Wilson and Ian Ingram.
Courtesy Peters Projects
Meanwhile, the show Machina includes works from Paul Sarkisian, Joel Hobbie and John Peralta, a trio of genre-busting new media artists who each reconcile their creative hand with technology to explore relationships between humans and machines. Sarkisian, a longtime Santa Fe artist, projects video of his own design onto 3-D objects. Peralta, meanwhile, dissects old or otherwise obsolete 20th-century machines like typewriters, then reconfigures them into entirely "new" sculptural works. Gallery-represented local artist Joel Hobbie's site-specific piece, called "Neurons," will have interactive elements.
For me, the most successful show comes courtesy of Japanese artist Keiko Fukazawa, whose wry humor and politicized style is far-reaching and varied, but always biting. Her show here, called Hello Mao, is largely the result of an artist residency in China, a country whose political history inspires her; of equal importance are pop culture references, thus the title Hello Mao, a play on Japan's Hello Kitty. "I've known Keiko for over 25 years," Del Vecchio tells SFR, and over that time, he says, he's watched her develop a "deliberately subversive take on what a ceramic object means and can project." "Chinese Landscape III" is immaculately conceived, its mist-obscured blue mountaintops adorning a box-like porcelain piece. The whole thing, though, is covered with Louis Vuitton logos, which don't hide but gently overlay the imagery beneath. An associate professor and head of the ceramics department at Pasadena City College, this will be her first time exhibiting in Santa Fe.
"My plan is to always have multiple openings on a quarterly schedule," Del Vecchio explains, "with surprise shows from time to time." If fun, provocative shows like these are any indication, it's a great way to get new folks in the door.
5 Exhibitions Opening Reception
5 pm Friday March 23. Free. Through May 25.
Peters Projects,
1011 Paseo de Peralta,
954-5800
