SUSAN BEINER: SYNTHETIC REALITY

ASU Art Museum Ceramics Research Center
March 15-August 2, 2008

Synthetic Reality (detail), 2007, Cast porcelain, glazes. Photo: Darien Johnson

Friday Conversation On Exhibitions
Friday, March 28, 11 a.m.
ASU Herberger College School of Art assistant professor and artist Susan Beiner
A gallery talk about the artist’s work and her current ceramics installation. Organized by Peter Held, Susan Beiner: Synthetic Reality takes place in the ASU Art Museum Ceramic Research Center.

Artist Reception
Friday, March 28, 7-9 p.m.
Susan Beiner: Synthetic Reality holds a joint reception with Josh Greene: Some Parts Might Be Greater Than the Whole and Carl Andre/Tim Hawkinson. The artist reception is in both the ASU Art Museum and its Ceramics Research Center. The evening includes Night Acts: Transfix organized by ASU Herberger College School of Theatre and Film assistant professors Rachel Bowditch and Jacob Pinholster.

SUSAN BEINER: SYNTHETIC REALITY
What you see is not always what you get. In our digitized, photo-shopped world, reality is often altered and manipulated. Reality television shows seem unreal. With today’s technology, many products we use daily are manufactured with artificial materials or manipulated DNA aided by scientific processes, reshaping what was once all natural. Biotechnology allows for genetically altered foods grown in controlled environments, gene splicing produces cloned animals and hybridization of consumer products has changed our lives forever. Ethical issues continue to challenge these advancements. What are the costs of scientific efficiency versus environmental and health concerns?

Taking more than a year to complete, Synthetic Reality is the most ambitious mixed-media installation project created by Arizona State University Herberger College School of Art ceramic faculty member Susan Beiner. A childhood interest in the sciences, stimulated by her father’s vocation as a chemist, has lead to a recent fascination with making what is organic into synthetic. Clay and ceramic materials are natural materials mined from the earth; additional industrial materials (foam, Plexiglas and rubber) assist the artist in making an engineered environment. A fascination with opposites is employed as an artistic strategy: natural and contrived; minimal to baroque; and handmade versus industrial. “My interest is fueled by elements of layering, fragmentation, multiplication, juxtaposition and complication collecting in a room-sized gallery,” Beiner says.

This project is composed primarily of slip-cast porcelain forms that are altered and glazed with a luscious palette of colors. Seductive in materials, saturated hues of green, blue, yellow and peach activate the high-relief “plant life.” Colors flux together, mirroring the activities of microbes, leech ponds or aerial topography. The walls and floor of the gallery are encrusted with organic ceramic forms that interlock with one another, enveloping the viewer in a teeming sea of barnacled life. The repetition of forms, similar to cloning, becomes an artificial environment transporting the viewer into another world, at times familiar, yet foreign.

Trained in classical ceramic forms, Beiner’s career has steadily progressed from an object maker influenced by 18th-century European court porcelains to the creation of large-scale environments. A trend in the ceramics field, where artists are not confined to the past, but embrace an interdisciplinary postmodernist approach to their studio practice, Beiner’s latest tour de force is a heroic effort to enlighten us on the growing complexities of our lives.

Peter Held, curator of ceramics in ASU Art Museum Ceramics Research Center, curates this exhibition.

ASU Art Museum Presentation
Organized by Peter Held, Susan Beiner: Synthetic Reality takes take place in the ASU Art Museum Ceramic Research Center at Arizona State University.

Duration
Susan Beiner: Synthetic Reality (March 15-August 2, 2008) is open at ASU Art Museum Ceramic Research Center at Arizona State University Tuesday, 11 a.m. - 8 p.m. (summer hours: Tuesday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.); Wednesday – Saturday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.; Sunday, 1-5 p.m.; Closed Monday and holidays.

Support
This exhibition is supported by the Independence Foundation, Philadelphia, a Herberger College of the Arts Research & Creativity grant and members of CLA.

ASU Art Museum Exhibitions
Selected past exhibitions at the ASU Art Museum include:
BETWEEN CLOUDS OF MEMORY: AKIO TAKAMORI
FOLLOWING THE RYTHMS OF LIFE: THE CERAMIC ART OF DAVID SHANER
RENEGADE CLAY: FIVE VIEWS FROM THE WEST
DESERT CLASSICS: CERAMICS IN ARIZONA
LUO XIAOPING: THE TIME SQUARE SERIES
EMBRACING NIGHT: FARRADAY NEWSOME SREDL

More information contact John Spiak at spiak@asu.edu.
back to current exhibitions