From RIVER HOUSE ARTS
River House Arts and Contemporary Art Toledo will present “Mapping Desire: Explorations in Making and Thinking in Contemporary Ceramics,” an exhibition showcasing work by Ebiteneyfa Baralaye, Alex Ferrante, and Matt Wedel.
An opening reception for the show will be held at the gallery, 425 Jefferson Ave. Toledo, Saturday, Nov. 5 from 5-7 p.m. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Friday 11 – 6 p.m. or by appointment click here or by calling/texting 419-441-4025.
Curated by Brian Carpenter and Brynn Higgins-Stirrup, “Mapping Desire” invites viewers into the creative worlds of three extraordinary ceramicists, allowing them to see their practice through the lens of “making” as a mode of “thinking through” – a process of understanding one’s place and politics and a way of cultivating the rich internal landscape each of us call home.
Exploring the space between aspiration, external forces, and internal realities, “Mapping Desire” contemplates, populates, and expands this moment of “thinking through,” allowing us to witness its unfolding.
About the Artists
Ebitenyefa Baralaye is a Detroit-based artist and educator whose work explores cultural, spiritual, and material translations of objects, text, and symbols interpreted through a diaspora lens and abstracted around the aesthetics of craft and design. His interest is in modes of abstraction as the primary vehicle for narratives of black experience, going back to Nsibidi script, traditions and practices of African craft and the development of blues music and gospel spirituals in America.
Baralaye holds a BFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in ceramics from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. as well as in Korea and Canada. He is currently an assistant professor and section head of ceramics at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
Alex Ferrante’s practice “exists between the conscious self as subject, and the world beyond as object.” The artist engages ceramic materials to examine a central question: “how has landscape, a representation of that which is exterior to ourselves, informed the creation of the human subject?”
Ferrante holds a BFA from Texas A&M Corpus Christi and an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder. He has exhibited throughout the U.S. and in Singapore and is currently a visiting professor of ceramics at the University of Toledo.
Matt Wedel is a Colorado native now based in Athens, Ohio. Recognizing that “there is baggage with being a medium-specific ceramic artist today,” he states his art strives to “explore the medium and expand on [its] history.”‘Mapping Desire’ offers the first public viewing of his newest body of work, ‘Images in Abstraction (Mythology Series)’ an expansion of his own practice and history with the medium. They are “markers of my subconscious that reveal language previously unengaged.”
Wedel received his BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA at California State University Long Beach. He has been exhibited throughout the USA, Canada, the UK, and Switzerland, has been featured in numerous publications including LA Times, Huffington Post, Sculpture Magazine, and ArtNews.
Matt Wedel’s first large scale solo exhibition in a major museum, “Phenomenal Debris,” opens to the public at the Toledo Museum of Art on Saturday Nov. 5. The artist’s public talk with TMA’s Diane Wright, Senior Curator of Glass and Contemporary Craft, begins on Saturday at 2 pm in the Museum’s Little Theater.
