Ceramics and mixed media come together in “Cycle,” an exhibit featuring the works of Monica Wilson and Valerie Mann, at MCC’s Overbrook Art Gallery March 16-April 24. An artists’ reception and talk will take place on Tuesday evening, March 31.
Both Wilson and Mann have an experienced and well-crafted touch with their respective materials. Together they build pieces that interact in the gallery space. Some collaborative works are ethereal with cast shadows on to ceramic surfaces. Other more absolute combinations host silhouettes, glazed directly into the clay pieces.
The artists’ works crossover with reflections on domestic spaces, using found objects/materials, references to home décor, and subtlety in their craft and aesthetics with shifts in surface quality and sheen.
Mann has shown her work professionally in the U.S. and abroad for 24 years. Her work has received numerous awards and appears in public and private collections in the U.S., Europe and Asia. The public collections include Parkview Hospital in Ft. Wayne, IN, and several Michigan locations at Muskegon Community College, Grosse Pointe Library, Saline District Library, and Google in Ann Arbor.
She grew up on a working farm, helping raise livestock, corn, soybeans, wheat and hay. Spending many hours outdoors and doing physical labor gave way to letting her imagination run wild. Having materials of all kinds available and parents who were largely unaware of missing spray paint cans led to interesting murals and manifestos ‘appearing’ on interior barn walls. Mann is inspired by the outdoors, people, materials and pushing the boundaries of possibility with those materials.
Wilson, an art instructor at Summers-Knoll and president of Clay Gallery, both located in Ann Arbor, MI, has taught ceramics, pottery and art in Michigan and was a visiting lecturer at Brigham Young University in Utah. She has worked as a videographer and photographer in Jordan and Morocco.
Her work is influenced by the constant push-pull between the organic and the mechanical, variation in physical and psychological weight, and the process of working with a malleable material and firing it to an inflexible object. Recent works combine memories with materials: plastic grapes from her mother’s Thanksgiving cornucopia, a crawdad’s hidden black egg cluster, and nostalgic surfaces like flocking, wax, rubber, and concrete. Combining distal products, such as porous terra-cotta with vitrified porcelain or hand-made objects with new and reused manufactured materials, is a springboard for her current work.
Wilson earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Eastern Michigan University. She received the 2012 Emerging Artist Award from the Michigan Ceramic Art Association and the 2004 Emerging Artist Award in Wooster Ohio. Her work has been exhibited statewide in galleries in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Birmingham, Flint, Kalamazoo, Rochester, Adrian and Blissfield.
The artists’ reception on March 31 will be held from 6-7:30 pm in Overbrook Gallery. Their talk starts at 7 p.m. The Overbrook Gallery is located in the Frauenthal Fine Arts Center on the MCC campus. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. weekdays with special weekend and evening hours during theater performances, receptions, concerts and gallery talks. Call (231) 777-0324 for more information.