Also this issue: Marcel Marceau -Deni Kasrel Art in Northern Liberties -Debra Auspitz Rambleshoe -Janet Anderson Macbeth -Peter Burwasser Self-Criticism George Pelecanos’ previous work is his own toughest judge. -Justin Bauer

March 20-26, 2003

art

Eye Candy

Detail of Candy Depewâs Of a Tear (2003), a mixed media ikebana arrangement in front of a gold leaf wall drawing. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

The tantalizingly decorative work of Candy Depew draws the viewer into its complex, multicultural core.

by Robin Rice

"Ryoanji Baroque," I scrawled in my reporter’s notebook while admiring Candy Depew’s three grouped installations, "Climbing Mountains," at The Clay Studio. I can’t improve on that perverse oxymoron. Depew’s layered and culturally eclectic work, while sometimes apparently pirouetting on the abyss of decorative chaos or, at least, disarray, is at its core selective, precise and beautifully focused.

In the west, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are high-profile fans of the extravagant, even gaudy side of Japanese visual culture -- the opposite of the reductive, earth-toned aesthetic epitomized by a Zen rock garden that is daily raked into precise patterns. Ryoanji in Kyoto, the best known, has become such a cultural cliché that one can mail-order desktop models of it, complete with soil and tiny rakes -- satori in a sandbox.

One installation in "Climbing Mountains," Mountain Range, incorporates slab-cut, black-stained porcelain mountains, flat cutouts drawn from traditional Chinese landscape painting. Depew characterizes them as "desk screens," offering contemporary scholars (or tax accountants) the opportunity to contemplate an approximation of the inspiration of the sages of old.

Depew pulls together the disciplined simplicity of the Japanese tea ceremony or misty-shrouded Chinese landscapes with the glittering baroque flourishes we find in the imperial buildings at Nikko, Japan, and abruptly juxtapositioned patterns on fashionably layered kimonos. And she finishes it all off with the lush swirls of European rococo architectural (or is it pastry?) decoration.

Of a Tear, a wall-based piece, includes an ohara-style ikebana arrangement on a black wooden shelf. The shelf is visually anchored to a black rectangle of molding that does not enclose but still frames a wall painting in gold leaf. A diagonal fragment of trellis composed of extruded pipings of clay, also black, relieves the severe intersection of the large geometric elements. The organic quality of this diamond grid echoes Depew's thrown and deformed ikebana vessel, glazed or tinted black and delicately flecked with spray-on gold.

Depew might seem to satirize the refinement of ikebana with chunky clay cherry blossoms. Their thick cracked stems protrude from a mass of green silk foliage augmented with coarsely fashioned, cookie-like porcelain leaves. The conjunction is almost gauche, but it works visually, conveying an impression of joyful improvisation.

A story is told that the disciple of one of the great tea masters served tea to the teacher and other students. Afterwards, a fellow student ridiculed his performance as rushed and clumsy. "No. It was perfect," said the master. "He was sincere." The seeming awkwardness of some elements in Depew's work resonates with traditional Japanese ceramic processes that prize the record of every crack and tear in the clay.

Though none of the details of the wall image in Of a Tear are exactly representational, it has the gestalt of a religious image. Depew's artist's statement relates it to a story of a beautiful woman born of the tear of a compassionate immortal. An asymmetrical (Chinese-inspired?) arrangement of lines like fluttering draperies and an oval within larger circles suggests the face and halos of Kwan Yin.

Spring Grasses Near the Stream consists of a folding fabric screen jutting away from a wall-mounted paper image. The whole represents a landscape constructed through screen-printed elements, found fabric and exuberant porcelain flowers attached with tie-tack pins. (Similar flowers can be purchased individually, perhaps to wear as brooches.) The color here is springlike, emphasizing grass green, pinks and blues. A cloud motif that drifts through the exhibition in extruded clay sketches appears here in photographic form.

Beneath a chandelier-like mobile, Rain Cloud, with five long glass pendants, a narrow mirrored table supports the Mountain Range of cut-out porcelain. Water elements in the landscape are also made of porcelain slabs, resembling oversize iced cookies. The toy or model-like quality of these three-dimensional landscapes reflects their antecedent's potentially kitsch iconic status, an issue we in the west usually do not address when dealing with historic Asian art.

Part of Depew’s accomplishment in this body of work is the integration of an array of personal and specialized techniques in clay, fibers and screen printing with a list of objects (flowers, solid porcelain "rocks" reminiscent of Wayne Higby’s landscape rocks, black "rocks" fired from slip-soaked sponges, piped porcelain "icing," cut-out slabs and so on) which she places in more than one context.

A confectionary subtext brings the culinary arts into the gallery context. It is emblematic of Depew's goal in this work: the demonstration that "decorative arts" are real arts, the ones that speak to our daily lives and inform our private moments. Not merely the icing on the cake, they are the reason the cake attracted our attention in the first place. Depew's vision of a unified decorative environment is playful, refreshing and spiritually nourishing.