Maloney Fine Art is pleased to present “Needleworks,” Joel Otterson’s third exhibition
with the gallery, which explores two new bodies of work; two-dimensional beaded
“paintings” and three-dimensional hand-blown glass “flesh cups” which serve as a
homage to the diversity, dexterity and tradition of sewing, stitching and
embroidery.
Joel
Otterson is a sculptor who for 30+ years has worked his way through the house
and remade everything inside it. His hybrid mash-ups of our domestic
environment question our relationship to the home and to each other. His work
addresses the gender of objects, their place in culture and what it means to be
American.
Many
celebrated antecedents, from Austria’s Wiener Werkstätte applied arts fabrics,
Chinese embroidery, haute couture fashion to 18th and 19th century samplers,
inspire Otterson. Materials used include wool, cotton and silk fabrics,
combined in complex and sophisticated ways; along with cotton, silk, cashmere,
and metallic threads. These contemporary samplers of dissonant yet harmonious
combinations, incorporate beads, individually crafted ceramic pieces, found
jewelry, semiprecious stones, coral, amethyst, bone, plastic, metal and wood,
often creatively used as pavé embroidery on Persian rugs, mounted on wood.
With a nod
to the painter James McNeil Whistler, Otterson entitles many of the works with
musical parallels; Green Sonatina, a
symphony in green, Rosa Toccata (from
Italian toccare, "to touch"), is like a virtuoso piece of music,
emphasizing the dexterity of the artist's fingers. Otterson’s samplings are his version of a
sampler gone atonal.
In addition
to his beaded opus, Otterson acknowledges the “needlework” art of tattooing
with Flesh Cups, a series of
hand-blown glass cups, in the Venetian style. Incorporated into each cup is a
narrative rendered in enamel, taken from Russian Criminal Tattoos. These Flesh
Cups mark a return to Otterson’s 1992 work History of Rock ‘n’ Roll Dinnerware, a gobbing of rock and roll
logos and imagery onto European Continental 18th Century style
dinnerware.
Otterson
received his BFA from Parson's School of Design in 1982 and started exhibiting
at Nature Morte Gallery in New York's East Village. In 1987 he had a solo
exhibition in MoMA's project series. Otterson was the artist-in-residence
at Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington, in 1995 and 2015. His work was
included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the Hammer Museum's "Made in
L.A." in 2012, and most recently, in "Man-Made: Contemporary Male
Quilters," at the Craft & Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles.
His work is
included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art,
The Hammer Museum, The Cincinnati Art Museum, The Jewish Museum, The Israel
Museum and many other public and private collections internationally.
Otterson
currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
