Table

Work by Jason Hackett, Beth Lipman, Nava Lubelski, Heather McCalla and Jaydan Moore
November 14, 2014 – January 11, 2015

TABLE presented contemporary craft by artists using ceramics, glass, wood, fiber and metal. Inspired by traditional dining furniture and service ware, TABLE both celebrated and scrutinized the material pleasures of formal dining through the work of artists who use historical forms and materials associated with the table as a point of departure for conceptual art. The exhibition intentionally coincided with the holiday season — a time when people traditionally gather around the table amidst diverse settings and situations.

TABLE included both curated pieces and original works made for this exhibition by six artists who explore themes of mass production, social class, domestic history, familial relationships, as well as the art/design of dining service-wares and furniture.

Jason Hackett received his MFA in ceramics from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Craft/Material Studies, where he is currently a faculty member and studio manager. Previously he worked as an apprentice and studio manager for artist Jun Kaneko and as the education studios manager at Pewabic Pottery. In 2014, he received a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Artist Fellowship.

Hackett’s work has been exhibited internationally at IX International Bienale of Ceramic Art in Portugal and in Romania at Galateea Gallery and across the United States and in conjunction with the NCECA conference in Phoenix, AZ. His work can be seen in the public collections of Marywood University and The City Museum of Aviero, Portugal.

Hackett views his artworks as both physical and philosophical memorials to “closeness.” His installations, celebrating the collaboration of the handmade and the machine-made, explore the value of community and family, the honesty of both gross and tedious labor, the mysteriousness of the metaphysical, and the passage of time. Individually, the plates are stacked and made of clay. Collectively, they are symbols and metaphors simultaneously expressing proximity and distance, material and immaterial, the tangible and intangible.

Beth Lipman earned a BFA from the Tyler School of Art and has received numerous awards including a USA Berman Bloch Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Virginia Groot Foundation Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant.

Lipman has exhibited her work internationally at such institutions as the Ringling Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Gustavsbergs Konsthall, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her work is in the permanent collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Jewish Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Design, and the Corning Museum of Glass.

Lipman worked previously as education director at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, N.Y. and as the arts-industry coordinator of the artist-in-residence program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She has taught at the Pratt Fine Arts Center at New York University, the Parsons School of Design and the Bard Graduate Center. She currently lives and works in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.

Lipman is renowned for her sculptural compositions that recreate the bounty and visual sumptuousness of Renaissance and Baroque still-life paintings, particularly 17th-century Dutch scenes. Lipman takes elements from these paintings — static composition, expressive light and opulent decoration — and translates the scenes into three-dimensional glass. Her objects, like those in the paintings, are chosen for their connotations. Overturned goblets and broken glass symbolize human frailty and mortality.

Nava Lubelski received a degree in Russian Literature & History from Wesleyan University. Lubelski has had solo shows at LMAKprojects in New York and at OH&T Gallery in Boston, and her work was recently included in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts & Design, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Queens Museum of Art. Lubelski has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant. She was artist-in-residence at CUE Art Foundation and the McColl Center for Visual Art and currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Lubelski’s work explores the contradictions between the impulse to destroy and the compulsion to mend. She juxtapose rapid acts of destruction, such as spilling and cutting, with painstaking, restorative labor. Embroideries are hand-stitched over stains and rips, contrasting the accidental with the meticulous, constructing narrative from randomness and mistake.

Heather McCalla earned a Bachelors of Arts in Applied Design from San Diego State University and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2013. She lectures at UW-Madison in furniture design and woodworking before moving to Richmond, Virginia, where she is currently a Fountainhead Fellow in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Craft/Material Studies. Her work has been exhibited extensively across the United States, including exhibitions at both the Neuberger Museum of Art in New York and the Haggerty Museum of Art in Wisconsin.

Through the use of recognizable domestic objects, architectural forms, and outmoded construction techniques, McCalla’s work explores complex feelings and relationships associated with home and family.

Jaydan Moore earned his BFA from California College of the Arts and an MA and MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been a university fellow at UW-Madison, a resident artist at the Houston Contemporary Craft Center, and a Fountainhead Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Craft/Material Studies. Currently he is in his first year as an artist-in-residence at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina.

Moore focuses on the heirloom, exploring how an object moves through the world, changing in meaning as it passed down, and how it is cherished as its significance grows. By deconstructing and reassembling found silver-plated tableware into new objects, he commemorates the individual’s ability to do the same to his/her own valuables and memories.

Jean Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received a Bachelors of Fine Arts and MS from Pratt Institute. She has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures and Sculpture, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award. Her works have been featured in many publications, including Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, and The New York Times. Shin’s work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including in solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Fabric Workshop and Museum, and Projects at the Museum of Modern Art. Other venues include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asia Society and Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City. She lives and works in New York City.

Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. For each project, she amasses vast collections of particular objects that are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community. Distinguished by her meticulous, labor-intensive process and her engagement of community, Shin’s arresting installations reflect individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society.

This Exhibition was supported in part by Altria Group, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.