John Gill:
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE?

This presentation includes a grouping of monumental vases and covered jars, created over the past three years. These vessels are intricate inside and out, and architectural grandeur on a miniature scale is hidden away within their jubilant exteriors. Especially in his larger open forms, Gill approaches his work from every possible angle, rotating it as though in zero gravity and building it without a defined top or bottom. In the case of his jars, once they finally come down to Earth, the artist completesthem with precise-fitting, highly ornate lids. Gill’s closed forms create new private spaces andinvoke a distinct utility within his lexicon of subverted purposes: to conceal. The inside of the jar becomes a secret, its unseen volume now enclosed.

On the outside of each work, Gill stretches textures and color out onto space, blending art historical lineages with aplomb. The artist especially looks to painting for inspiration, and takes in his surroundings as a painter might to inform his use of light and color in three-dimensional space. Gill’s ceramics synthesize the natural world through diverse schools of thought, employing sensibilities that range from Impressionist to Pop, from Fauvist to Abstract Expressionist. The rugged stepped forms on the outside of one of Gill’s jars could be as easily traced in the carved staircase of an ancient temple as they could be in those of a painting by Marcel Duchamp; the wobbling, graceful curve of a vase’s belly could be as inspired by a river basin as it could be by Stuart Davis’s flattened painted forms. In constantly colliding angular and soft, vibrant and quiet, Gill’s works walk a path that balances tradition and innovation to moving effect.