Onement

August 31 - December 18, 2012 Free Admission

Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, on the campus of State Fair Community College, presents the exhibition Onement, in the Goddard Gallery, from August 31 until December 16, 2012. The exhibition comprises 18 abstract ceramic sculptures from the Daum’s permanent collection by 11 contemporary artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Richard De Vore, Yi-Wen Kuo, and Virginia Scotchie.

The diverse ceramic sculptures in the exhibition Onement all reconcile their salient non-representational physicality with the suggestion of a kinship to things found in the natural world. Jeffrey Mongrain’s Hollow Drop makes permanent the ephemeral ripples caused by an object tossed in a dark pool; Bobby Silverman distills the flaming hues of autumn foliage in his three panels of vividly glazed porcelain; while Ruth Duckworth evokes a surreal landscape in her untitled wall relief: She presents a horizon line, perhaps; water and sky; a sitting duck? The reconciliation of what is presented with what might be conjured results in an onement of form and allusion, a unity between the artist-made and the viewer-imagined.

The Daum Museum’s collection of contemporary ceramics is one of the key concentrations in the museum’s permanent collection. It contains 140 ceramic works, mostly large-scale, dating from the 1970s until the present. Artists include an international roster of influential and celebrated figures, among them Rudy Autio, Peter Voulkos, Karen Karnes, Jun Kaneko, Betty Woodman, Michael Lucero, Sun-Koo Yuh, and Sergei Isupov.