We're noticing family resemblances among a variety of artists working in the mold of the bizarre, the alien, and the misshapen. Take the collage work of our good friend Wangechi Mutu or Kojo Griffin's recent painting work. Add to this list Philadelphia ceramics artist and sculptor Syd Carpenter who brings a swath of this prickly strangeness into the third dimension. Carpenter is one of 19 artists in Shades of Clay: A Multi-Cultural Look at Contemporary Clay currently at Ursinus College in the Philadelphia area. Curated by local sculptor Paul A. Wandless, the exhibition is designed to demonstrate "how multi-cultural and multi-ethnic clay sculpture is today." Though we're pretty sure clay has always been multi-ethnic, we're glad to see that fact acknowledged in this 55-piece exhibit, which includes artists of African-American, Afro-Cuban, Thai, Chinese, Latino, and Native American descent.
Carpenter's work combines and recombines shapes--tails, finlike apparatuses, coils, balls, wheels, and nests--in a kind of intuitive and personal grammar of forms that hints at biomorphic collisions and abortive chemical-industrial experiments. The show has received a mixed review from the Philadelphia Inquirer, though Carpenter's entry, "Internal Noise" was described as "simple and wacky yet authoritative" and "the best item in the exhibit." Carpenter is currently associate professor of studio art at Swarthmore College. The show runs through September 24.
