If art is a room, then craft, perhaps, is its connecting hallway, enabling access but also offering an exit. Additionally, whilst in the art space the focus is on viewing, in the craft corridor the manifest activity is communal making—usually from shared techniques—because for craft, the making and the sharing-in-the-making is the real product. For sure, an ultimate craft object is important, but only as a representation of the work done in its service. Without the social and the collegiate and the participative, craft is devoid of meaning. You can’t outsource the process.
Therein lies the existential difficulty at the heart of “Folk Methods with Spatial Problems,” at Western Exhibitions. Here, artists from the Ox-Bow School of Art who co-teach ceramics and quilting present work imbued with a “communal endeavor where knowledge and skills are shared alongside conversation and innovation that solidifies community,” according to the press release. Granted, but as a viewer, not having access to the communal endeavor, or the sharing or the conversations, necessarily leaves you outside the community, and marginalized. The object, in craft, necessarily has limited power.
It’s not the fault of the work, or the industry—craft is among the more meaningful art forms precisely because it exists in this process. It’s simply an issue of confused lexicon, like screening the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” at a memorial service.
Taken individually as objects, the work of Chris Edwards, Lauren Gregory, Henry Crissman and Virginia Rose Torrence all display expansive flair and speak in distinct voices. Gregory’s quilts are playful, humorous and reward intricate study, with symbology drawn from pastoral scenes, through to cartoons and on toward self-improvement maxims of dubious wisdom. Edwards’, on the other hand, are crisper, cleaner in their lines and almost always strikingly beautiful. Elsewhere, the ceramics of Torrence and Crissman include multiple unique pieces that you would consider exchanging your house and perhaps even your family for (craft is par excellence at creating the unique). The positioning of most of these pieces on the floor in the center of the room makes it awkward to appreciate them holistically, although this also ensures the unusual vantage point of a bird’s eye view—not the standard observation deck for appreciating ceramics, but refreshing nonetheless, up to a point.
An interesting by-product of the collaboration between the four artists lies in the admission of how their teaching work at the Ox-Bow School of Art necessarily makes “impressions on the studio practice of collaborators.” The suggestion is that a particular aesthetic begins to emerge from close personal and professional overlaps, but a divergent thought is that ultimately, the real craft method here—in which “a knowledge base” is “created and circulated” through an “interdependent and collaborative space”—lies in the art of teaching itself.
“Folk Methods with Spatial Problems” is on view at Western Exhibitions, 1709 West Chicago, through August 16.
