standard, abstract

HB381 is pleased to announce standard, abstract, a solo exhibition of American ceramic artist John Shea’s latest body of work.

John Shea’s practice belongs with equal comfort to pottery, painting, sculpture, and installation art and yet—a free radical—it belongs exclusively to no one camp. Instead, the work lives confidently in a world of in-betweens. The result feels nuanced, self-nurturing, and balanced. In a world suffering from extremes and tribalism, Shea’s formalism dwells happily in the middle.

Starting from a shaped, wooden base, the artist hand builds his forms by pinching together small balls of clay. Some surfaces are then burnished smooth as flat planes and others left lumpy and rounded, but neither is too perfectly so. These ceramic sculptures are both muscularly abstract and evoke their own delicate elements, such as silica crystals, viewed through an electron microscope. They are both parts and the sum of their parts.