From a Tree Grows a Forest: an Exhibition Honoring Professor and Artist Edward S. Eberle, The Terrarium Gallery at Drawing Rooms, 3/1/24 - 4/13/24

Response to "From a Tree Grows a Forest: an Exhibition Honoring Professor and Artist Edward S. Eberle"
By Claire McConaughy

March 21, 2024

Edward S. Eberle 1944-2023

There are many influences on an artist’s body of work, but a foundation of encouragement, sharing, nurturing and love from a teacher can be the platform from which one’s creative work can truly rise. The exhibition “From a Tree Grows a Forest: an Exhibition Honoring Professor and Artist Edward S. Eberle” has at its heart, artworks made by Ed Eberle from the 1980s to 2017, and works from six of his former students who together pay tribute to their teacher and his influence on their art and lives. There is also a touching video made by his son, JPC Eberle, of the artist as he throws and forms the clay that he spent his life following. JPC's video features many closeups of Ed's hands forming sculpture which show his deep connection to clay that was more than a material; it was an extension of himself. Ed's former students in this exhibition are a sampling of the many artistic lives he touched during his time teaching at Carnegie-Mellon University, the Philadelphia College of Art and through his ceramic studio in Pittsburgh. Curated by Anne Trauben, the group of artworks show the connections between the teacher, students and true friends who respected and enriched each other’s lives in art.

The focus of the exhibition is Eberle’s unique ceramics. The featured pieces in this review range in size from a 4.5" x 15" x 15” shallow bowl to a vessel that is three feet tall and two feet wide. Eberle’s greater body of work includes explorations with drawings and very large ceramic sculptures that are shown in the catalog as being almost human size and having the presence of visitors in his studio. Eberle’s vessels are covered with stream of consciousness drawings of which he says “… I don’t have a specific story to tell. The story, if there is a story, is only seen after the piece is finished, but it won’t be one story, it will be many stories, if there’s a story at all.”1 With or without a specifically intended story, the drawings are complex and completely captivating. They scrawl across the curves and bumps of the surfaces, many figures interlaced and overlapping as if they are simultaneously depicting the past, present, future, and a disorienting fantasy world. The scratchy black terra sigillata and stain lines on matte grey-white porcelain clay are loose and uninhibited, covering the surfaces without logical sequence, and can be picked up in any area and followed in an unfolding narrative/non-narrative. Images are of figures (some have wings, or monk’s robes, or are multi-headed), patterns, men and women’s faces (some with halos or books for hats), animals, birds, and expressive marks and brushstrokes. They are derived from this world, but the world they exist in doesn’t rely on logic. 

Edward S. Eberle, Draw A Line With A Feather, porcelain,
terra sigillata, 8.5 x 5 x 5.5, 2019

Eberle’s works in the exhibition are mysterious and metaphysical the way “Alice in Wonderland” is disorienting and magical. A special version of this disorientation is shown by the porcelain sculpture “Complex” (2017). “Complex” is a simplified head with facial features entirely covered with scratchy black drawing that reminds one of old age wrinkles, facial tattoos, or an image of what someone could look like if the stories and people of their life were visible the first time you met them. There is a hole at the top of the head surrounded by black, which could be a portal to and from the inside of the head/sculpture/person and everything else/people/nature/God/the universe and back again.

Edward S. Eberle, Complex, front, side and back views, 2017,
9.5 x 7 x 8.5, porcelain, terra sigillata and stain

His drawing is key to his ceramics and several ink drawings on paper are also on view in the exhibition. One large ink drawing, “Landscape” (1990), shows Eberle’s expressive mark making bouncing across the paper in movements like animals playing or dancers in a more abstract expressionist style.

Edward S Eberle, Landscape, 29 x 40, paper, ink, acrylic, 1990

This is an opportunity to see Eberle’s mark-making shown in the stoneware piece, “Number Two” (1990), and “an Appearance” (late 1980s), as a pre-cursor to the surreal depictions in the more recent works.

Edward S. Eberle, Number Two, stoneware, terra sigillata, stain,
35 x 24 x 13, 1990

Edward S. Eberle, an Appearance, 4.5 x 15 x 15, porcelain,
terra sigillata, stain, late 1980s

The artistic and very deep connections Eberle made are evidenced by his six students’ artworks shown alongside his masterful ceramics. Both Graham Marks and Ian Thomas work in ceramic sculpture. Marks' pieces are painterly glazed candelabras that are wonky, and delightful. The pieces are made of ribonny ropes and organic shapes that pour through each other like activated painterly lines that culminate at a flower-like blossom for the candle. They move like marine plants gently swaying under the sea. Ian Thomas’ pieces are simplified head-shaped vessels that have incised comic faces that emote quirky moods, such as “Smile” and “Indifference” (both 2022). The faces’ expressions are drawn in a lighthearted way, as if a kid grabbed a stick and, through a few quick strokes, made the clay into a live, feeling entity.  

Graham Marks, Candelabra, ceramic, 13 x 10, 2022

Ian Thomas, Smile, porcelain, woodfired, 9.5 x 7 x 7, 2022

Ed Eberle fostered his students’ art practices, whether they were working with clay or other mediums, and several of them in this exhibition present drawings, paintings, and needlepoint.

Denise Suska Green and James Pustorino share large scale abstractions filled with color, shapes, and movement. Their surface relationships differ greatly in style and material, but their underlying spiritual interests have a kinship. Suska Green uses handmade paper of nuanced color and organic forms evoking nature. “Surfsong” and “Cove” (both 2020) have references to environmental beauty while using materials sourced from repurposed domestic textiles and linen garments. Her use of recycled natural materials shows a dedication to the environment that is treasured and revered for something more than our human use of it. James Pustorino offers a large abstraction of bold, vivid color exploring narrative through space and composition in “Container for the Universe” (2023). The convoluted movements twist and turn into each other creating interlocked passages. The segmented abstract shapes pull the viewer through a speedy roller coaster ride that flips and twists without paying attention to gravity or general laws of physics. Even though he uses synthetic materials and heightened color on geometric shapes, the painting shows Pustorino’s sketchy drawing that allows the viewer to feel a human presence in the image while the overall image feels like a macro view from the eye of the universe.

Denise Suska Green, Cove, handmade paper, 69 x 41.5, 2020

James Pustorino, Container for the Universe, acrylic and pencils on dDuralar,
80 x 75, 2023

Greg Kwiatek’s square needlepoint, “Untitled II” (2021) is elusive. The mysterious object feels more like an ancient Yantra than a 21st century endeavor. The description of the piece involves geometric relationships gently, meditatively, repetitively stitched on a grid, making one assume that process is a key element in the piece. Based on its symmetry, the composition looks like the result of planning, but the artist states that decisions are made intuitively. It becomes a diagram of harmonic relationships that is clear and bright in its simple geometry, and reflects craft, precision, and dedication.

Greg Kwiatek, Untitled II, needlepoint, 15 x 15, 2021

Vast open spaces of thought and reflection can come from seemingly minimal images. Scott Vradelis’ rectangular, color relationship paintings allow for aesthetic interpretations of moments, experiences, memories or the concept of non-content. His color choices are compatible and soothing. Seeing the slate-grey/blue rectangle, overlaid with a rich burgundy rectangle of pulled brushstrokes in “Poem for Studio Cricket Variant 7” (2021), in-person is truly the only way to experience Vradelis’ work. The scale relationships between rectangles that can function as windows or frames also have impact on the experience of the work, as each one feels specifically determined, perhaps because they are based on weight of color and value in a purely visual sense, or on the weight and value of an intangible essence. 

Scott Vradelis, Poem for Studio Cricket Variant 7, pigment in acrylic binder on
prepared dibond panel with aluminum angle backing, 25.5 x 41, 2021

“From a Tree Grows a Forest…” is a perfect title to capture the extent of the beloved professor and artist Ed Eberle’s legacy, which has clearly grown to forest dimensions. 

Images from “A Drawing Thrown”, 2016 video by Edward. S Eberle and JPC Eberle

"From a Tree Grows a Forest: an Exhibition Honoring Professor and Artist Edward S. Eberle" will continue on view at Drawing Rooms Terrarium Gallery until April 13, 2024.

Claire McConaughy is an artist. While not a former student of Professor Eberle, she was aware of his influence and the admiration he received from his students, friends, and fellow artists. Learn more about Claire here.

1. Contemporary Craft, “Ed Eberle in His Studio”, Video produced by Terry Rorison and David Newbury, YouTube, August 25, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Qqqv4J_1s

Just Beneath the Surface, 7/11/19 - 8/11/19, at Drawing Rooms

Touching the Void 

by Peter Delman

First, this show is the color of photography— black and white photography.

Jeri Coppola, Me Without My Shadow

Second, unusual in a visual art show, the featured sense is touch over sight. The hand of the artist, literally, is everywhere. A very long arm and hand are animated by fluorescent light in Jeri Coppola’s Me Without My Shadow, wrapped in a translucent skin of hand-made paper. 

Lee Arnold, The Swim

In Lee Arnold’s The Swim, a pair of hands sweep through the bubbling sea, capturing the tactile quality of the water. As befitting a show titled Just Beneath the Surface, the submerged swimmer periodically comes up for air and glides through the choppy wavelets. 

Katrina Bellow, Hawak/Hold (Kai)

Katrina Bello draws handfuls of water, but the flesh itself has disappeared, with only the shape of the water defining the cupped hand. 

Caroline Burton, Incarnation 31

The textural surface of found afghans, fabric sacks, and rabbit fur are printed or transferred onto canvas, hydrocal, or bronze in Caroline Burton’s work.

Much of the work is a high-wire act juggling the ephemeral and the physical. 

Jeri Coppola, Listen, I Have Told You Everything

The delicate gray photographic images in Coppola’s work are often battered with industrial sealant and paired with wood and wire flotsam scavenged from under a sawhorse. 

Caroline Burton, Figure 1p

Burton’s rabbit fur is far from fluffy. It looks like the remnants of an ancient bogman’s pet — or dinner—preserved in bronze.

Memory is a touchstone for these artists. The memories here are often wrapped in an enigma. 

Katrina Bello, Hawak/Hold (8.832, -124.5085)

Bello’s charcoal meditations on the Pacific Ocean focus on the eddies that swirl water from below to the surface. The eddies and the vast ocean itself may be seen as a metaphor for the memories of her experience of migration from the Philippines, and her subsequent family narrative. 

Caroline Burton, Incarnation 2

Burton’s Incarnation 2 suggests a looming barrier from a child’s eye view—The Tower of Babel perhaps, or fittingly, a stairway to heaven. 

Lee Arnold, Stereo

Stereo, originally shot in super 8mm film by Arnold, pairs unassuming, graceful images of travels in Europe with the blurred “memory” of the same shots reduced to mild gray shapes nearing the vanishing point.

The deft orchestration of this exhibition by curator Anne Trauben leaves room for interpretation by the viewer but consistently brings us back to common ground. In Stereo, a panoramic shot of high divers breaking the surface of water is followed by a seal gliding just under the surface and then playfully emerging from below. In other work, the reference may be nuanced, but we are invited to consider the surface represented and the significance of what is to be discovered beneath.

This work contemplates empty places, often with a sense of understated spirituality, as distinct from religion or faith. Touring the exhibition might be seen as visiting points on a roadmap to the sublime, reminiscent of the intention of Hudson River School artists in the nineteenth century. The artists often rely on their sense of touch in order to consider the void.

This show aspires to a state of grace and sometimes rises to the level of Baudelaire’s definition of beauty, “a spark between something fleeting and something timeless”. 

Lee Arnold, Walpurgis Nacht

Exhibit A is Arnold’s video Walpurgis Nacht in which alpen peaks, the place where Thomas Mann wrote Magic Mountain, seem to breathe clouds of mist. I half expected Caspar David Friedrich to emerge from the fog. The show’s monochromatic austerity can be intoxicating. When you leave the exhibit, the red brick warehouses and chirpy blue July sky may seem a touch trashy by comparison.

Just Beneath the Surface, 7/11/19 - 8/11/19, featuring works by Katrina Bello, Caroline Burton, Lee Arnold and Geri Coppola is curated by Anne Trauben.

Peter Delman is an artist living in Jersey City. Read Peter's bio here and view his artwork here.

Let Me Tell You a Story, 5/23/19 - 6/23/19, at Drawing Rooms

by Peter Delman

 

Racial identity and gender identity are underlying themes in the exhibition "Let Me Tell You A Story". But to leave it at that would be to miss a great deal. For these artists, identity is a platform from which are launched many journeys of discovery. A pivotal moment or break from tradition is often the key element in their origin stories.

For Abebunmi Gbadebo, the break was a total rejection of traditional art materials because of their association with Whiteness. She says, “My material is human hair from people of the African Diaspora. Our hair is so connected to our culture, politics, and history. It is history, DNA". Ibou Ndoye’s work builds on the tradition of Senegalese glass painting to create his personal folklore. It was when he literally broke the glass he was working on and reassembled the shards that he achieved a new level of energy in his work.

Theda Sandiford’s art is, in a sense, a soap box from which her voice can be clearly heard in a culture where too often she feels that "I am disappeared. My opinion, my ‘hand’, is dismissed outright". Shoshanna Weinberger’s work is rooted in her outsider status as a woman "considered ‘exotic’ in America and ‘not Jamaican-enough’ in Kingston". She channels the Carrie Mae Weems trope of “otherness doing otherness things” to generate jarring images of fragmented female identity. The male gaze that dismantles the bodies of women, and specifically black women, in a macho body shop of the mind, is the subject of Kimberly Becoat’s Urban Hottentot Series.

The Drawing Rooms gallery itself has embarked on a journey to develop a new identity. In the first major curated exhibition in its handsome new space, curator Anne Trauben offers a thoughtful, provocative experience for viewers. A major goal for the gallery is to encourage connections between regional art communities. This exhibition, for example, includes artists Gbadebo and Weinberger, based in Newark, and Becoat, in Brooklyn. Ndoye and Sandiford from Jersey City round out the roster.

The stories these artists tell are often unflinchingly critical of the racial stereotypes and fragmentation of gender identity ubiquitous in our cultural narrative. The exploitation and denigration of the female body represented in Becoat’s work refers to the story of Sara Baartman, who in the early 19^th century was paraded around Europe because her supposedly distorted body profile was considered an example of racial barbarity. She was known as the “Hottentot Venus". “Hottentot” itself was a derogatory slang term invented by the Dutch settlers of South Africa.

This demeaning objectification of black women is not limited to the history books. In recent years, cultural icons such as Grace Jones and Venus and Serena Williams have been subjected to demeaning characterizations of their bodies.

Kimberly Becoat, Hottent Harvest, collage

In Becoat’s collages, Tootsie Roll Pops and Bit-O-Honey replace female heads. In Hottent Harvest, some figures grasp small fetish-like figures – one of these shelters under a cantilevered butt bearing the legend “SEE MOON OFFER ON.” All this presumably for the delectations of the only head with eyes to see – a white man with an ironic flower in his mouth – suggestive of a serial killer’s calling card.

Shoshanna Weinberger: Triptych left to right: My Midnight Pink Emerging, Between Atmospheres and Bloodlines, Side Part, ink and collage on paper

Much of Weinberger’s work addresses similarly haunted terrain. In her 2012 solo show What Makes My Hottentot so Hot, and in many of her paintings, she confronts the grotesque and sexualized result of taking the “male gaze” to its darkest logical conclusion. The two works in this show are kinder, gentler meditations on identity – still the pink lips in her triptych are a real “punch in the mouth”.                                                                         

 

Theda Sandiford:
Neon Auto Tune – Limited Edition, 
digital collage on metallic photo paper

Lush lips feature, too, in Sandiford’s “Big Mouth” series. The lips are emblematic of her conscious act to embrace the power of her own voice. In Stay Woke, she deploys an arsenal of collage materials to build a whimsical self-portrait. Her two digital collages shimmer with rivulets of color and graphic energy. Neon Auto Tune – Limited Edition puts in mind the view from the bridge of a starship accelerating into hyper-space.

There are also links between Sandiford’s muscular rope sculptures and Gbadebo’s hair sculptures. Both artists work with community members to create these pieces. Gbadebo writes, “My art stores have become local barbershops and people’s homes. Every piece is made by my community. Strangers trust me to give a new purpose to their hair.” Sandiford is displaying her community-made fiber sculptures here for the first time. The hair braiding ritual is also the subject of one of Ndoye’s paintings.

 

Adebunmi Gbadebo:
Am I Still Dreadful, human hair

Gbadebo’s pieces combine the soft and the powerful like a cloud in a thunderstorm. The rippling form of Am I Still Dreadful, evoking a hair shirt and the golden fleece, commands its space on the wall with nobility. Untitled 15 is like a rope or a chain that can be seen as a reminder of oppression, but oppression overcome by the strength of individual discovery and the positive bonds forged by communities.

Weinberger writes, “The work explores my experience with ‘invisible blackness,’ ‘passing,’ and ‘Double-Consciousness’…anonymous portraits or headshots, alluding to my personal relationship with intersectional-identity, alienation and otherness". In One Pink Sunset Among My Midnight Selfies, the barely discernible images in the black frames may represent the virtually invisible aspects of the artist that are overshadowed by the selfie mask. Or perhaps they conjure the under-told story of the many women struggling in the shadows, unrecognized.

In Ndoye’s monumental paintings, the theme of community is strong and vibrant. Women often play leading roles, and the gestures of the figures are affirming and evoke trust and hope. But there are hints of sorrow too in the many unsmiling faces, and all the figures look away as if distracted by some unseen concern.

Ibou Ndoye:
The Arrival of the Fisherman,
painting on canvas

The Arrival of the Fisherman is the most joyful of the paintings. The background grid is alive with fish. The figures lift their arms in exaltation. A fishing boat is held aloft. The collaged fabric patterns, the vigorous background designs, and the demonstrative gestures of the people describe a moment of peace and plenty.

Currently running in Chelsea is a Robert Longo show that lights the way for making forceful, biting political art. The five artists in this exhibition are on this path, with their strong statements on gender, racial identity, and the restorative power of community.

Let Me Tell You a Story, 5/23/19 - 6/23/19, features works by Adebunmi Ghabedo, Shoshanna Weinberger, Theda Sandiford, Ibou Ndoye and Kimberly Becoat, is curated by Anne Trauben.

Peter Delman is an artist living in Jersey City. Read Peter's bio here and view his artwork here.