LAGUNA BEACH, CA.- In his first museum exhibition, renowned potter Adam Silverman creates a series of installations ranging from displays of his pots in various settings to video pieces. The theme that runs through Adam Silverman: Clay and Space is the relation of art to nature. Silverman brings to his pottery both an architectural sensibility and a keen response to natural forms and materials—the spiral growth of sea shells, the textures of coral and barnacles, the rhythms of the tide, waves and seaweed, clay and wood.
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The exhibition coincides with the publication by Skira Rizzoli of the first book on Silverman’s work, Adam Silverman Ceramics. “Adam Silverman’s pottery thrives on duality,” writes artist Shepard Fairey in the book’s foreword. “ Beautiful and ugly, refined and unpredictable, resolved and organic . . . His pots and sculptures are a harmony of contrasts in the search for perfect imperfection.”
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Silverman’s passion for clay began 25 years ago at the University of Colorado. He continued his education at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied architecture, art, and design. He moved to Los Angeles in 1988 and practiced architecture before co-founding X-Large and X-Girl clothing. He has worked full-time as a potter since 2002, exhibiting widely in the U.S. and Japan. Since 2008 he has been studio director of Heath Ceramics.
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Adam Silverman: Clay and Space will form part of the museum’s upcoming Art & Nature event, a multidisciplinary celebration of art’s engagement with the natural world, which is scheduled for November 7-10, 2013 and is generously supported by the Draper Family Foundation Fund and an anonymous donor.
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The artist describes the sequence of installations that he has devised specially for the presentation of his work in this exhibition:
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“Each gallery has a unique but related installation. Visitors to the museum see parts of the first three galleries from the lobby, which draws them into the first installation and then on a processional toward the fourth gallery at the back.
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The first gallery features an installation of fifteen plexiglas boxes containing pots, mostly examples of my more recent work.
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The second contains two large ‘rooms’ defined by curving brick walls that alter the otherwise rectilinear space and compress the space through which visitors pass on their way to the third gallery. The walls have gaps in the brick pattern so that you can see through them. The rooms they form are like human-sized pots, on the inside of which there is an installation of the pots I have been making out of materials from Laguna Beach and firing on the beach. The pots sit on burnt wood shelves that are integrated into the brick walls.
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The third gallery presents a large-scale ceramic sculpture on axis with the entrance into the first gallery, so that it’s visible from the lobby and draws the visitor toward it.
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The fourth features two video pieces. One is a collaboration between myself and Lucas Michael. It is a white pot sitting on a pedestal, with a video projected onto it. The video shows the same pot rotating, and the result is a very beautiful illusion of the pot being in water, or swept by the wind. The other video is of Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, a beautiful, small pilgrimage church in eastern France. This building has been enormously influential on me and my work. In its forms it is closely associated with the sea, and at the same time it is like a large pot that people can go inside. It feels like the outside and the inside were made simultaneously, as though the building were a pot, which is very unusual in architecture.”
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