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If you're looking for a younger artist whose work taps into legacies of West Coast ceramics, you might need to head east or, for the next few weeks, to Santa Monica, where New York-based Kathy Butterly offers a dozen small ceramic vessels, as well as drawings, at Shoshana Wayne Gallery.
In the late 1980s, Butterly studied at UC Davis with Robert Arneson, the Northern California ceramics guru and Funk artist. You can see his influence in her work, with its goofy mix of torqued, raw physicality and doting attention to detail.
Precisely awkward, Butterly's ceramics have a dazzling, funny and sometimes poignant ability to extend the long tradition of the ceramic vessel as stand-in for the body. Or at least they effectively prompt viewers to project that upon them.
They begin as simple bulbous or cylindrical vase forms that the artist squeezes, squishes, twists and throws off their axes. Small additions are made -- underdeveloped appendages, odd accouterments, decorative flourishes -- using any manner of process. The pieces are perched on specially made bases or feet that suggest a melange of architectural styles -- from great civilizations past, utopian modernism and its cheesy derivations.
Glazes handled in a dozen or more firings define elements within the works and heighten their decorative quality. Surfaces suggest satin, moss, plastic, leather, flesh and, well, glazed ceramic.
In addition to Arneson, Butterly's work also shows the influence of Ron Nagle, whose tiny, ultra-slick cups and bottles have the presence of larger objects of desire that have been distilled down or stunted. There are hints too of Adrian Saxe, a master of a rococo garishness that is self-celebratory and self-effacing, and Ken Price, with his gift for locating humorous pathos in heavily abstracted form.
For all their hints of vulnerability, the works of these other artists have a certain swagger and confidence about them; Butterly's seem to be trying to hold it together. Although made of enduring materials, her small pieces suggest the stability of a souffle, a house loose on its foundation or someone trying to walk on heels for the first time.
That might suggest a gender difference between Butterly's work and that of her West Coast predecessors. It's certainly worth considering her in relation to such...