Susan Beiner - Synthetic Reality
date:Friday, July 18, 2008 time:10:00 AM to 5:00 PM venue:Tempe Center address:10th Street NE corner Mill Avenue Tempe, AZ 85281 View map posted by:Herberger College of The Arts
What you see is not always what you get. In our digitized, photo-shopped world, reality is often altered and manipulated. Reality television shows seem unreal. With today’s technology, many products we use daily are manufactured with artificial materials or manipulated DNA aided by scientific processes, reshaping what was once all natural. Biotechnology allows for genetically altered foods grown in controlled environments, gene splicing produces cloned animals and hybridization of consumer products has changed our lives forever. Ethical issues continue to challenge these advancements. What are the costs of scientific efficiency versus environmental and health concerns?
Taking more than a year to complete, Synthetic Reality is the most ambitious mixed-media installation project created by Arizona State University Herberger College School of Art ceramic faculty member Susan Beiner. A childhood interest in the sciences, stimulated by her father’s vocation as a chemist, has lead to a recent fascination with making what is organic into synthetic. Clay and ceramic materials are natural materials mined from the earth; additional industrial materials (foam, Plexiglas and rubber) assist the artist in making an engineered environment. A fascination with opposites is employed as an artistic strategy: natural and contrived; minimal to baroque; and handmade versus industrial. “My interest is fueled by elements of layering, fragmentation, multiplication, juxtaposition and complication collecting in a room-sized gallery,” says Beiner.
This project is composed primarily of slip-cast porcelain forms that are altered and glazed with a luscious palette of colors. Seductive in materials, saturated hues of green, blue, yellows and peach activate the high relief “plant life.” Colors flux together, mirroring the activities of microbes, leech ponds or aerial topography. The walls and floor of the gallery are encrusted with organic ceramic forms that interlock with one another, enveloping the viewer in a teeming sea of barnacled life. The repetition of forms, similar to cloning, becomes an artificial environment transporting the viewer into another world, at times familiar yet foreign.
Trained in classical ceramic forms, Beiner’s career has steadily progressed from an object maker influenced by 18th-century European court porcelains to the creation of large scale environments. A trend in the ceramics field where artists are not confined to the past, but embrace an interdisciplinary postmodernist approach to their studio practice, Susan Beiner’s latest tour de force is a heroic effort to enlighten us on the growing complexities of our lives.
Peter Held, Curator of Ceramics in ASU Art Museum, Ceramics Research Center, curates this exhibition.
Friday Conversations on Exhibitions: Susan Beiner, Artist:
Friday, March 28, 11 a.m.
Public Reception:
March 28, 2008, 7–9 p.m.
This exhibition is supported by the Independence Foundation, Philadelphia, Pa., a Herberger College of the Arts Research & Creativity grant and members of CLĀ.
LOCATION:
Ceramics Research Center
Tickets: Free
