Upcoming State of Ceramics

About the Artist

Sam Mack make site-responsive sculpture that positions the vessel as allegorical device and politicized form. guided by cross-disciplinary research practices and theories from transgender studies, neither human figure nor automobile body are directly represented in the work. rather, each resides upon the periphery, intentionally invisibilized as unseen forces which act upon the objects in the exhibition space. the installed objects reference strategies of survival, pleasure, and refusal used by queer and trans people in the us to navigate the expanding obstacles of systemic bureaucratic exclusion. tools, consumer objects, and artifacts are remade as non-functional clay forms individually constructed to crack, resulting in surface variation that values rips, fissures, and evidence of action.

Mack prioritize the fragmented surface as a method of mark-making and as an archive of the materials’ transition and transformation from clay to ceramic. the forms are assembled with found and fabricated media, forming a grammar of material to guide viewership through institutional signs and signifiers of surveillance, caution, and control. stilled arrangements invite close readings of the humorous subtexts and slippages of meaning in function, form, and coded language, revealing the myriad tensions and inevitable myth-makings among objectification, representation, and fetish present within the traps of institutional visibility and display.