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Kellogg Johnson 2007
October 5 - December 1, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, October 5, 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe
1011 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
TEL 505.954.5700 FAX 505.954.5754
Hours: Monday-Saturday 10am - 5pm
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For further information contact:
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Kellogg Johnson has long been drawn to the vessel form as the essence of ceramic art. Instinctively aware of the depth of meaning within our ancient human engagement with ceramics, he has evolved an archaeological metaphor in his work. He builds large-scale vessels and takes them through a physically arduous and hazardous process of firing and finishing with the result that his pieces already appear to be artifacts of great antiquity. Stained and scarred, burned and blemished and sometimes even broken and repaired, they seem as if they had lain in the earth for millennia, relics of some long-forgotten civilization. In their ambitious scale, Johnson's vessels are actually larger than most ancient pottery—except, perhaps, the great clay jars called "pithoi" found in the labyrinthine storage magazines of the Palace of Minos.
Johnson trained as an artist at UCLA and California State University, Fullerton, in the 1970s, in the wake of the great revolution in ceramics that had occurred in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ‘60s. One of his teachers was Jerry Rothman, a member of the legendary Otis group that included Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, John Mason, and Ken Price, who all had re-energized ceramics, driving it into a sculptural dimension. Johnson’s interest in sculpture led him to study both ceramics and bronze casting, media that share a reliance on modeling and incorporate heat and fire into their processes.
Johnson fires his pieces singly in a large outdoor kiln. Removing the piece while it is still glowing red-hot with the heat of the kiln, he thrusts it into a specially prepared hole in the ground, where he has added sticks and newspapers and other flammable debris. The debris catches fire, and Johnson then covers everything with a large tub, trapping the smoke and creating a sudden reduction chamber in a technique similar to Japanese raku firing. This results in random and unpredictable smoke stains and oxidations that color and fuse with the cooling clay.hrough his choice of age-old vessel forms, and through the violence and unpredictability of his firing process, Johnson's pieces acquire the character of heroic survivors.
A catalog will be available with essays by Jan Adlmann and William Peterson.
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