Gallery 263’s “Future Craft” is a memorable exhibition on view starting Thursday that asks what happens when the futuristic and handmade collide – and answers with a series of exquisite, otherworldly objects.
With materials ranging from clay to glass and even foam, every piece chosen by Kendall Reiss of the jewelry design program at the Rhode Island School of Design looks irresistibly touchable.
Robin Hoerth’s “Hunger and Headaches” shows a unicorn in a cloud with lightning bolts, all made from thin threads of glass. It’s fantastical and bright, which could also describe Garret Gould’s “Trophy Tag,” a lobster-clawlike object of carved poplar, lacquer and enamel. The red object has ends curling in with an opening in the center, almost like a portal. Amy Chan’s “Tile 71” spray paints a clay knot shape with bright yellows and oranges. Six grooves run through the length; the interplay between the colors and textures is rousing.
The show isn’t just pretty: It’s politically potent, contending with the meaning of materiality in an era of online malaise. In a piece called “Search Vase,” Hannah Duggan stacks stoneware Google searches on top of each other: the repetitive searches seem to shout into the void, a visual echo. It’s part of Duggan’s fantastic “Post-Internet Ceramics” series, in which the artist embeds Web-based imagery onto irregular vase forms. There’s something inherently silly about putting Internet speak onto something seemingly more permanent. It’s playful yet ominous, an art piece that seems to believe in the “dead Internet era.” “Search Vase” begs the question: Is our social-informational ecosystem stable? And if not, what comes next?
It’s the exhibition’s gentle undercurrent that makes it so striking. In “Ouch II,” Rora Blue weaves Band-Aids and pressed flowers, charming and tender and oh-so-delicate.
Ultimately, “Future Craft” seems to tell us, materiality is what matters. We are what we make.
“Future Craft” is at Gallery 263, 263 Pearl St., Cambridgeport, through Nov. 10.
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