HARK!
I hear … a rocker …
You wouldn’t know it, just from talking to the humble, soft-spoken artist, but she is pretty huge in the rock world.
We’re not talking the Foo Fighters or Metallica or others who sculpt stadium anthems with electric guitars, we’re talking someone who looks at a rock, and thinks, “I can work with you.”
Welcome to “Mineral,” Christy Wittmer’s second exhibit at Eye Lounge in downtown Phoenix, showing through Dec. 12.
Christy Wittmer and "friends"
Wittmer will leave her Phoenix-area home for an NCECA ( National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) Artist Residency in Rome. Pre-pandemic, she had residencies in Australia, China and Germany.
She’s had several shows here, including at the Mood Room and Chandler-Gilbert Community College, where she teaches. Raised and educated in Ohio, she came here after her husband discovered the desert landscape during a cross-country motorcycle tour; Christy was in China, at the time, on a Fulbright grant.
“We really liked Phoenix, partly because there’s an art scene here—an emerging art scene,” she said.
Though Wittmer is a trained painter, “I consider myself a sculptor," she says. She was drawn to forming figures because “clay is kind of forgiving, you can change it…”
As her artist statement explains, her new ceramic works and drawings “consider the small scale of a rock and the larger processes that a rock implies.”
Clay, she continues, is the result of the weathering and eroding of rocks over centuries. “Inherent in ceramics is a relationship to the earth and the formation of minerals when elements come in contact with intense heat. Ceramics are human-created minerals. The artist considers this responsibility as she explores abstraction, investigating and experimenting to learn more about the materials and their potential.”
During a Zoom interview, Wittmer gave HARK Valley a tour of her exhibit, which is both humorous and jolting.
One of the themes of HARK Valley is to look at “agitated artists”—with that in mind, what in the world gets Wittmer riled up enough to make artistic statements?
“When I'm making something, I feel like I’m looking at the world with a critical eye...I’m looking at critical issues. Recently the pandemic has been a big issue, also climate change; I’m thinking about those things.”
Even with an exterior world showing seeming stability, she senses “a temporary equilibrium... things are about to get crazy. We witnessed that with the pandemic.
“I think with my approach, I try to be less didactic and less angry and more approach it out of a place of humor or subtlety. When the viewer sees my work, I try to invite them in with lovelier surfaces…”
She hopes her audience will sense the depth of her work, imagining the feel of the textures and ripples: “My expectation as an artist is a viewer will just look and not touch,” she noted.
Wittmer feels this exhibit marks a key phase in her career: “ I’ve been using rocks in my past work as a found material. I take those things and bring them into the gallery and hopefully have viewers think about how we go through the world...
“Ceramics are rocks; they will never go away. They may break, but we have ceramics that are thousands of years old.”
She plumbs those ideas in her artist statement:
“...My intricate porcelain forms are records of time, skill and the process of making. Broken objects are repaired because they are needed or valued. Found objects are inconsequential debris that are collected and given purpose. The time spent in making, repairing and finding becomes an act of caring embedded in the work.
A few of Christy Wittmer's creations
“Then I arrange, assemble and stack these materials, which are held together by the weight of one object supporting another. As these precarious compositions are navigated, the observer becomes hyperaware of their own body in the space and anxiety increases. The tenuous stability of the work acknowledges the temporary equilibrium of the present moment.”
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