A group show of ceramic works by artists from California and Mexico.

Pia Camil

Through her work, Pia Camil has shown a proclivity to failure or the decaying associated to the mexican urban landscape, aspects of modernist culture and traces of Art History. Her practice has explored the urban ruin – including paintings and photographs of halted projects along Mexico’s highways (highway follies); abandoned billboards that become theatre-like curtains therefore theatricalizing failed capitalist strategies (espectaculares), or the problems and contradictions that arise when engaging with iconic art works (No A trio A or Cuadrado Negro).

Pia Camil was born in 1980 in Mexico City, where she continues to live and work. Her work has been shown in Mexico, Colombia, France and the U.S. She received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and her Master’s of Fine Arts from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. In 2009, she formed El Resplandor, a performance-based band. She has received awards including the European Honors Program, Palazzo Cenci, Rome, Italy in 2001 and she was nominated for The Paul Hamlyn Award, London in 2008. Camil’s work is in the permanent collection of La Colección Jumex, la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and the Wattis Museum amongst others. Her solo exhibitions include "The little dog laughed" at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, "Entrecortinas: abre, jala, corre" at OMR Gallery, Mexico City, "Espectacular Telón" at Sultana Gallery, Paris, and "Cuadrado Negro" at the Basque Museum-Center of Contemporary Art in Spain.

Patrick Jackson

Patrick Jackson (1978, Los Angeles, California). His sculptures refer to early modernism and surrealism and often convey a feeling of confusion. He uses dreamlike forms and tonal contrasts to build a cityscape that has no actual semblance to reality, puts figures on parts of glass making them function architecturally and is always in the search of balance in his works. He obtained his Master in Fine Arts in 2007 and recently participated in the LA Weekly Track 16 exhibition.

Danny First

Over the past few years, Danny First has been sculpting ceramic busts of fictional characters. These imaginary portraits consist of subtle variations on a pared down face! : two holes for eyes, a nose, and a horizontal line for the mouth. By slightly altering the arrangement of these four elements, the subjects of his work each take on their own personality. Their blank gaze is haunting and uncanny. Each of these characters is a little language, First leaves room for the viewers to recognize themselves in the sculptures. He is interested in playing with the divide between the formality of traditional sculpture and the empathy he has for his characters. He balances the material heaviness with humor, levity and above all, pathos.

Danny First also developed a series of work utilizing recycled materials to create functional art benches. They incorporate text reflecting First’s droll sense of humor.

Roger Herman

A long respected figure in the Los Angeles art world as an artist and professor who has been primarily known for the past 30 years for his large scale paintings and woodcuts exploring abstraction and figuration. In addition to his painting, Herman has had a long–standing interest in ceramics, employing traditional forms and adorning them with impetuous drawings of nude figures.

Roger Herman has shown widely in the United States and Europe. Solo exhibitions include those held at Ulrike Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles; Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles and New York; Froment Putman Galerie, Paris; Larry Gagosian, Los Angeles; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; Museo del Arte Contemporana, Mexico City; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Herman’s many group exhibitions include The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.CP.S. 1, New York; Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Museum Ludwig, Saarlouis, Germany; and Art Museum of São Paulo, Brazil.

Herman has been on faculty for the Department of Painting and Drawing at UCLA since 1990. He was also the cofounder of the legendary Black Dragon Society in Los Angeles from 1998–2008. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Sterling Ruby

Sterling Ruby’s ceramic work is informed by the California craft movement and German "hot lava" vessels from the 1970s as well as by the amateurish biomorphic shapes made in an Art Therapy class. His ceramic works feature thick, vivid glazes and charred and gouged surfaces on rudimentary forms resembling baskets, vessels, or body parts.

Sterling Ruby is at the forefront of a generation of LA artists whose training enables them to successfully mine the legacy of recent sculpture, particularly Minimalism and its aftereffects—artists as different as Jason Meadows, Taft Green, Won Ju Lim, and Rachel Lachowicz. Ruby is also a storyteller, motivated by formal and ethical questions.

His point is not to stage a solipsistic conversation about the art of the 60s, but to use his knowledge of these forms to speak to something far more pressing—the vampiric impulses of an undead empire, one that continues to devour resources because it cannot be laid to rest.

Sterling Ruby lives and works in Los Angeles. He has recently held major solo exhibitions at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2013); Fondazione Memmo, Rome, Italy (2013); and the exhibition "Soft Work", which commenced at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2013) and travelled to Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2013), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, Frances (2012), Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2012). Major solo exhibitions also include "Supermax 2008", Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA (2008) and "Chron", The Drawing Center, New York NY (2008). Running concurrently with his show at Hauser & Wirth, Ruby’s work is also featured in a solo show at the Baltimore Museum of Art and in the Whitney Biennial 2014. His work will be featured in the Gwangju Bienniale, the Taipei Biennial, and the exhibition "The Los Angeles Project", at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Tony Marsh

Long Beach, California-based potter Tony Marsh carefully creates and then deconstructs his ceramic vessels. Whether perforated or covered with protrusions, they are seldom without structural ornament. Early in his career, Marsh apprenticed in Mashiko, Japan with Tatsuzo Shimaoka, a potter known for his revival of ancient ceramic practices. Marsh’s training left him with an appreciation for formal technique and craft tradition, which he translates into his own creations that often resemble cellular structures, organisms, or other biomorphic forms.

Marsh is a graduate of Alfred University, Alfred, New York. Prior to that, he worked for three years as an assistant to Tatsuzo Shimaoka, Living National Treasure, in Mashiko, Japan. For the last 25 years, he’s lived and worked in Long Beach California and he is a professor of Art and head of the Ceramics Department at California State University, Long Beach. Marsh has lectured, taught and exhibited across the U.S., Europe and Asia.

His ceramic art can be found in many public and private collections around the world including the Museum of Art & Design and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of Art, Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Toronto, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Museum of Contemporary International Ceramic Art, Inchon, South Korea.

Peter Shire

Peter Shire’s overt dismissal of being defined by a label clearly acknowledges his concern with opening an aesthetic dialogue free of preconceived norms and ideas. A comprehensive and updated understanding of the arts is an essential attribute of his artistic vision. Rejecting the limitations imposed by specific fields and “proper” techniques, Shire has transgressed the orderliness of painting or sculpture traditionally defined as the “fine arts” and has included fields such as ceramics, furniture, and toys that have been consistently marginalized by the modernist discourse.

Shire does not reject the rich heritage of twentieth century art, and references to Bauhaus, Futurism, Art Nouveau or Art Deco are to be ground throughout his work. However, his art dismisses a facile linear trajectory and replaces nostalgic connotations with eclectic playfulness and subtle irony. One of the original members of the Milan-based Memphis group, Shire has challenged the rigidity of modernist vocabulary and has boldly articulated a novel languages defined by an unexpected visual dialogue between forms and surfaces and between technology and aesthetics. It is precisely this aspect of his art that has established him as one of the essential contributors to the postmodern critical debate.

Born in Los Angeles, in the Echo Park area where he still resides today, Shire is a native in a city that prides itself for the many cultures and languages it comprises. Shire recognizes the role his family had on both his social commitments and the development of his art. In particular, the artist acknowledges that his father’s concern with craftsmanship, with which he became familiar while working in his furniture design and manufacturer business, had a powerful impact on his later artistic views.

A graduate of the famous Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Peter Shire has an impressive exhibition record. In addition to many group shows, his works have been exhibited in numerous solo shows, in his hometown, Los Angeles, nationally and internationally in Milan, Paris, Tokyo and Sapporo. Shire’s works are in many public collections and museums in the U.S. and abroad.