- by Ian Holloway
They are discussing a piece of sculpture that resembles a cup. The cup, part of Kevin Snipes’ List Gallery exhibit “Uncontained,” presents those curious with more challenges than the task of drinking water. It begs, primarily, a deep consideration of the power of the porcelain medium. Cursed by the orientalist association between the frailty of its physical form and its supposedly limited social power, porcelain is rarely taken seriously and almost never considered a platform for high art. Kevin Snipes would likely argue against this perspective.
“No one expects challenging content from their porcelain. That would be in violation of its association with all things delicate, refined and un-offensive,” said Swarthmore art professor Syd Carpenter. “Graphic depictions of the unseemly or disturbing are more often reserved for lower caste or lower temperature clays, making Snipes’ pieces that much more subversively appealing.”
The exhibit was geared at students in the upper level ceramic art course The Container As Architecture. However, exhibit curator Andrea Packard makes it clear that the work appeals to anyone who is even latently socially conscious, referring to its presentation of the modern “thought structures” that people may use to form their conceptions of identity.
“Kevin Snipes helps us reconsider and transform those age-old oppositions that underlie ideological structures,” said Packard. “[His] graphic images of figures and the elasticity of his clay forms call attention to the way thought structures are both inherited and created.”
Snipes’ work relies heavily on twisting the figure. He has assembled a set of confusing shape featuring displays of stretched and contorted bodies. The structures themselves don’t seem to fit the traditional dimensions of the vases and mugs we understand.
“His figures … torque in ways that disrupt the symmetry and predictability of traditional vase or box forms,” said Packard. Pieces like Three Girls rely on asymmetry, tempting the viewer to judge it as they would a vessel for water and instead shocking them with what Packard calls “a life force that cannot be contained.” The presentation style of the figures is juxtaposed with the physical medium. Take, for example, the drawn subject’s hair in the piece Braid. Snipes combines the physical item and the representation of identity that is found in a hairstyle.
Snipes has painted the hair going up a chute on the vase, as if the hair is growing out of the porcelain. As Packard put it, “hair, that omnipresent and malleable marker of cultural identity, becomes one with the structure of the container.”
While the physicality of the piece has symbolic significance, it also reflects technical expertise. The crafting of the porcelain reflects the interface between modernity and historical cultures in the exhibit’s pieces.
“Each distinctive in form, the pots are clearly hand built porcelain under mishima and scraffito designs, methods going back through centuries and across cultures,” said Carpenter.
There are early modern and ancient influences present in the work that invokes consideration of current issues.
“Idiosyncratic shapes elevated on short feet recall 17th century Japanese Oribe ware. Greek and Roman red on black pots are also distant cousins,” added Carpenter. Snipes’ work, then, may be considered a clever appropriation of these classical forms, usually intended to commemoratively showcase idealistic images of serene domestic life.
“But make no mistake,” Carpenter said. “Snipes’ pots are of their time. Commemoratives they are not. Kevin Snipes’ pots remind us that our personal script is in progress and the intrigue of uncertainty guaranteed.”
So the pieces rely on timeless, old traditions, but twist them to reflect a modern confusion. But some of them are totally unrecognizable abstract forms in which, outside of the craftsmanship, there doesn’t seem to be any reference to something old.
Take Peanut Gallery, for example. The piece is a heavyset porcelain tower with faces painted on it. The faces, squished to be flatter than normal, follow the tower as it that thins out towards the top, only to explode into a three dimensional honeycomb-meteor structure serving as the top face’s hair. The pieces are varied in their levels of abstraction, but all of them exaggerate the human body in a way that raises questions for the audience – why do I think this body should look a certain way? Why am I amused by the fact that it doesn’t?
Also noteworthy is the humorous air of many of the porcelain’s painted figures. They look like comic strips or cartoons, which professor Carpenter believes is reflective of its approach and message — one also taken by Snipes’ contemporaries.
“From a contemporary perspective, Aaron McGruder, creator of The Boondocks comic strip, and British potter, Grayson Perry, come to mind. Like McGruder, Snipes uses a pop culture idiom, the comic strip, with its highly graphic style and accessible appeal to explore the interior experiences and perceptions of young African American males,” said Carpenter.
What is on display in these porcelain figures – a cultural assumption of black men and women – is twisted to look like something we have never seen, or never will see. Yet it is not offensive or noxious, and is deliberately familiar looking. There is still something haunting about the way the bodies rest on the mugs and vases. It brings to mind cheap horror stories of cameras that trap people in their Polaroid prints. Perhaps this is on purpose as our cultural perceptions are, indeed, simultaneously familiar and ghastly.
“Snipes’ figures exist in confinement and compression, their movements limited by the double-sided contours of the irregularly shaped containers. A Snipes figure is a distorted inhabitant of an ambiguous space, a mischievous genie trapped in a bottle,” said Carpenter.
The pieces are attractive and intriguing because they reflect a natural tendency to enter a comforting mindset when faced with a new experience. They present themselves as tame household objects, and their images bite with the eery melancholy of their almost grotesque faces.
“Snipes’ pots hint at vulnerability while implying the dangerous and obscene,” said Carpenter. “Or maybe more close to home, a Kevin Snipes pot is like a private note on folded paper, partially sealed, but too tempting to ignore.”
“Uncontained” closes today, with a closing ceremony being held in the List Gallery at 11:30 a.m. by the exhibit curator.
