‘Off the Walls’ brings art to pedestal in sculpture-based exhibition

Housed in the Gallo Family Gallery of Strohl Art Center, “Off the Walls” is one of Chautauqua Visual Arts’ largest exhibitions of the 2024 season.

“Off the Walls” is a sculpture-focused exhibition in which every piece is situated on a pedestal, highlighting three-dimensional art in an array of mediums. The exhibition, curated by Susan and John Turben Director of CVA Galleries Judy Barie, is on view through Aug. 20.

The work of 14 artists comprise the exhibition, from Dee Briggs’ minimalist abstract carbon steel creations, curving and curling through the space surrounding them, to Dan Droz’s “Thinking it Through,” which similarly explores space and perception. For Droz, his background as a designer and as a magician led to a newfound freedom to explore in sculpture.

Because he wasn’t attached to a specific medium in his career as a designer, Droz’s work as a sculptor makes use of many different materials, depending on what is best-suited to his current artistic goal.

Through his work, he aims to understand the limits of human perception and the idea that multiple realities can be true in any given situation. While he approaches his work with his own ideas, he enjoys hearing viewers’ takeaways and encourages them to approach his pieces with an open mind.

“The experience of the viewer might be quite different from whatever didactic message I had in mind,” he said. “I’m extremely interested in what other people, what viewers, see in the work.” 

Alison Croney Moses comes from a background in furniture-making. She uses traditional techniques like coopering and bent lamination to create her abstracted sculptures. She said she explores the relationship between interior and exterior spaces through her art.

“The human form, that curved safety form, often hinting at a mother figure or being underneath someone’s skirt or under a table; these soft yet strong forms that you get close to or inside or behind to hide,” Croney Moses said. “At times, it’s very playful and sometimes it’s about protection and safety.”

She said she hopes that her work serves as an entry point for both the technical process of woodworking and the exploration of safety. 

“For the person who this is kind of new to them, I’m hoping that it doesn’t feel so foreign and inaccessible,” she said. “This material is intriguing, the process is intriguing and then they’re open to where it leads them. If it brings them to where I’m thinking — great. If it brings them somewhere else, that’s awesome. I’m open to it all.”

Ceramicist Sam Chung uses Korean pottery forms as a way to understand his own cultural identity. His work, influenced by the Japanese mingei movement and by traditional Korean pottery vessels, explores the intersections of function, form and design in pottery. He begins each piece with a wheel-thrown form that is then altered to create the cloud contours that adorn the finished piece.

He said the cloud is a recurring form within his work, and he strongly identifies with it; he relates the cloud to his identity as a Korean American, particularly because of the prevalence of clouds as motifs in Korean culture. 

“The cloud, for me, is like a metaphor for floating in between two cultures,” he said.

Chung’s work is, ultimately, a seeking out of his identity. 

“The work is about me trying to use the reference of these Korean pottery shapes as a way to try to yearn. It’s like a yearning for my parents’ history, and so it’s really about seeking and trying to find some aspect of myself through these pieces,” he said.

Seth Clark’s mixed media sculptures are humorous and playful. His sculptures of decaying buildings — long a theme in his more two-dimensional art — sport dainty doll legs, bringing an unexpected twist of humor to each piece. His earlier work often dealt with heavier subject matter, and Clark has challenged himself to take a more optimistic perspective as a new parent.

“For me, it’s challenging myself in a way to feel a little more optimistic, a little more playful about the future of things as a new parent,” he said.

Brian Engel, a firefighter-turned-glass-artist, uses glass-blowing as a way to reconnect with his home. Tied to the scenery and surroundings of New Mexico and the Southwest, his work focuses on his sense of place. Engel found himself reminiscing on the landscape that surrounded him at home when he was separated from it during college.

“I used topographic maps as a form of escape because I couldn’t get out into the woods — into the mountains — so I would reach back to my old maps and, in my mind, because of the training that I had with my dad, escape through those maps and think about those places,” he said.

He took to glass-blowing after he left firefighting due to an injury, and his background in fire science has informed his relationship with manipulating the glass. Engel said he had no idea he was receiving necessary training while working as a firefighter, but it has helped him immensely in understanding the furnaces and equipment used in his artistic medium.

Kyle Johns’ ceramic sculptures are made by piecing plaster molds together to create his maximalist and organic forms. His work aims to tow the line between function — both sculptural and practical — through his process-based pieces. Meanwhile, Howard Jones’ “Glass Brush (1)” and “Glass Brush (2)” reimagine everyday functional objects in ways that depart from form and function.

Kevin Kao’s art focuses on gender identity and variations of pieces within large quantities of work. His handbuilt ceramics portray Caryatids, sculptures on the Greek Erechtheion, as a way of understanding how hair encodes interpretations of gender and identity. Growing up in a predominantly white community, Kao is interested in understanding identity and appearance through his work.

“A lot of my work is about identity and being presented in multiplicity, and how coded inference of form — meaning how the shape of things or the references of a crease or volume or a texture — can inform how identity is shaped and understood,” he said.

While Kao’s work references traditional figurative ceramics, Andrea Moon’s pottery references traditional utilitarian vessels.

She said her work takes inspiration from both the human figure and from traditional pottery forms. Moon enjoys clay because of its communal nature and the opportunity it provides to work alongside others to achieve common goals.

“Clay is a process,” she said. “It’s exciting, but you don’t feel necessarily like you can do it alone when you’re loading bigger kilns or need to fill a kiln. That’s where it hooked me beyond the material. It was the people.”

Moon said she hopes her work will imbue a sense of commonality, of shared vulnerability and connection.

“If they’re looking at my work, I’m hoping there is a sense of grace that they are feeling, and also that they see imperfections and it settles them because as I make it, I’m going through a self-therapy and healing,” she said. “It’s also a worthwhile feeling of practice, of making. All I think about when I’m putting it out there is more of a grace.”

For Nate Lucas, sculpture is a way to explore visual and tactile patterns. Using sculpture and abstract paintings on reclaimed natural wood, he makes pieces inspired by the natural and man-made world around him.

“My hope is to create objects that give the viewer some sense of awe I find in viewing brilliantly colored patch of lichen, stones on a riverbank or a crack in a sidewalk,” he wrote in his artistic statement.

Lydia Musco’s concrete pieces in “Off the Walls” correlate to her work on view in Melvin Johnson Sculpture Garden. Musco sees both her smaller and larger work as related, and she discovered connections she might not have otherwise noticed through her work being shown in both exhibitions. She said she enjoys seeing the collection of objects and how they relate to one another within the gallery space — with so many components, connections can be drawn between all of them.

Jose Sierra’s stoneware ceramics are thrown on the wheel, then altered, and are inspired by past and present surroundings.

“The images and memories of coffee mills, intensely colored mountains, dramatic landscapes, pre-Colombian art, and architecture of the Andean region of Venezuela all form an important part of my visual inspirations,” Sierra wrote in his artistic statement. “These elements combine with contemporary design as well as the geometry of the Catalina Mountains to influence and inspire my work.”

Ceramicist Shoji Satake uses similar techniques of throwing clay on the wheel to create vessels, but to a near-opposite aesthetic result. Using Chinese decorative techniques on thrown ceramic vessels, Satake created two pots to commemorate Chautauqua’s sesquicentennial celebration. Satake has taught, exhibited and studied at the Institution, and his art reflects the values and lessons he has learned here.

“When I reflect on my experience at the Chautauqua Institution as an artist, the freedom of expression stands out as a core value,” he wrote in his artistic statement.

“The celebration of community, and the integration of the arts into our lives through lifelong learning, inspired these two commemorative vessels,” he wrote.

“Off the Walls” brings together an expansive collection of sculptural objects, demonstrating the breadth of the contemporary sculpture scene for a glimpse into some of the many possibilities of the three-dimensional.