Alternate Geology
Mindy Solomon is pleased present Alternate Geology, Jay Kvapil’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. A highly trained maker, Jay studied tea ceremony ceramics in Japan at the Takatori Seizan Pottery on the island of Kyushu in Southern Japan in 1974-75. After returning to the United States, he received both his MA and MFA from San Jose State University where he also served as Conference Director for the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts Conference in San Jose, 1982.
Now Professor Emeritus, he served numerous roles at California State University Long Beach over a period of 36 years, including Director of the School of Art, Associate Dean, and Interim Dean for the College of the Arts; and as Dean of the College of Arts, Media, and Communication at CSU Northridge. At the national level, he served as Board Member, Treasurer, and Member of the Commission on Accreditation of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. Fully retired, he spends his time developing and evolving his artistry with a consistent interest in topography and geology.
“The eight pieces presented in this exhibition include examples from two bodies of recent work: five ‘rock’ pieces; and three ‘lava’ pieces. What they have in common is an interest (or perhaps obsession) with geology. The show title, Alternate Geology, refers to the idea that the pieces are a study of natural forms (geology) found in landscapes, reimagined, as coming from a somewhat different world.
The ‘rock’ pieces start by making plaster molds of facets of rocks that I specifically collected for their intense and detailed surfaces—surfaces that reflect their formation over millennia. Then I make clay slabs from those molds and set them aside as a kind of surface library, from which to create new ‘rocks’ from my imagination. To build the pieces, facet by facet, I ‘stitch’ together slabs to make new ‘rocks,’ which take the rough form of vessels—a process analogous to the computer-stitching of photos. Thus, physical materials are taken from the earth (landscape) and made into a new landscape, with both the forms and the surfaces being imaginary, and not an attempt to replicate actual rocks.
Nearly all of the rock pieces refer to vessels—both in shape, and in some cases with obvious openings near the top. Regarding the pieces described as ‘tea bowls,’ they are not intended to function like pottery used in the Japanese ‘tea ceremony.’ Rather, they are intended to be viewed in dialogue with that deep tea ceremony tradition, which has given us some of the most iconic forms and surfaces in ceramic art history.
Over the years the glazes I develop have become more extreme, to the point that they intentionally question the line between the beautiful and the abject. The ‘lava’ pieces presented here are three of the most extreme examples of that body of work. They started with precise wheel-thrown vessels that were transformed with the application of extreme glazes formulated to look and flow like lava.
Like earlier work, I used raw ceramic glaze materials in abnormal ways and forced the
materials in abnormal ways and forced the materials to melt, fuse, bubble, crawl, and drip in the firing—with the result being somewhere between chaos and control. In these three pieces, the glazes also have the addition of small ceramic rods mixed in with and applied with the glaze. To me, the rods are a reference to the building blocks of life, DNA, which hold the embedded codes for all life forms—in addition giving the glazes more mass and intentionally disrupting the precise forms. Each piece was fired multiple times, with more glazes and raw materials applied in successive firings until the result pleased me or the piece was destroyed. The final work is a narration of each (minimally controlled) experiment.”
Both monumental and spare, each object is a meditation on surface and form. In his second presentation at the gallery, Kvapil continues to demonstrate why his years in the field have yielded such a meaningful body of work.
About the Artist
Jay Kvapil is a California artist whose work has been shown at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; the Oakland Museum; Scripps College; the San Jose Museum of Art; San Francisco State University; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; and numerous other national and international exhibitions. Jay is currently represented by Mindy Solomon Gallery, Galerie LeFebvre et Fils, Paris, and Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles. Recently, his work has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Sevres National Ceramics Museum, France, and the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, California.
Upon finishing undergraduate studies, Jay studied tea ceremony ceramics in Japan at the Takatori Seizan Pottery on the island of Kyushu in Southern Japan in 1974-75. After returning to the United States, he received both his MA and MFA from San Jose State University where he also served as Conference Director for the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts Conference in San Jose, 1982.
Now Professor Emeritus, he served numerous roles at California State University Long Beach over 35 years, including Head of the Ceramics Program, Director of the School of Art, Associate Dean, and Interim Dean for the College of the Arts. He also served as Dean of the College of Arts, Media, and Communication at CSU Northridge. At the national level, he served as Board Member, Treasurer, and Member of the Commission on Accreditation of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design.
