Ceramicist Ginny Sims’s Pottery Dreamworld Come to Life
Minneapolis artist Ginny Sims’s Postcards from the Night opens at Nationale Saturday.
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There is a surplus of hot people making pottery on the internet. The pots, good or bad, don’t really matter. And the hot people making them matter only insofar as their fine-line tattoos and Berlin haircuts are able to represent a certain ideal. Flickering across your phone screen, their hands romance mud into useful objects—cups and bowls that might touch your actual lips, should you click through to their Etsy store. And from their dewy faces sparkles the vision of a life so much richer and more fulfilling than your own. Simply living really can be art, you think to yourself, after scrolling past the best of these.
The fantasy collapses when the leaden chopstick holders and clumsy berry colanders scuff your counters instead of changing your life. But the irony in this relatively recent social media embrace is that pottery, made in various traditions around the world for millennia, has always played its part in making life—real life—more beautiful. The artist Ginny Sims makes pottery, sculpture, collages, and paintings that delight in the art of this domestic context. Sims, who recently won the Rome Prize fellowship, lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, America’s pottery hotbed, where she landed after studying and apprenticing at a pottery in England. Instead of, or, rather, in addition to continuing the legacy of functional studio pottery, Sims pushes the humble craft into the world of fine art, toying with and calling out the ways pottery melts into the everyday.
Postcards from the Night, which opens Saturday at Nationale (3–5pm May 17; thru June 15), promises to be a sort of dream journal in three dimensions. Sims’s pitchers and teacups adorned with crimped, Staffordshire-style handles sit in the gallery next to figural sculptures and candelabras, together evoking fleeting scenes of dreamlike interiors. Her installations blend homey kitchens and white cube galleries, sometimes displaying fruit bowls and egg cups inside a hutch, while other times drawing pictures of the furniture on the walls and placing the pots on invisibly white gallery shelves and pedestals. Sims’s dreamworld is not unlike that of the anonymous, wheel-throwing hotties online. But her dreams are aspirational like a Bonnard painting, one you could step inside, somewhere you’ve been, IRL, and hope to get back to.
More Things to Do This Week
VISUAL ART Patricia Vázquez Gómez
THRU MAY 31 | PICA, FREE
Though her own family lost traces of its Indigenous language, Vázquez Gómez, a local artist who grew up in Mexico and teaches at Portland State University, found an affinity with the Yucatec dialect maayat’aan spoken by many people in her Northeast Portland neighborhood. The observation sparked ja’/buuts’/t’aan (Water/Smoke/Word), a video and audio installation made both in Portland and Yucatán, over six years, in collaboration with kids in her neighborhood. In part, it’s an effort to help these kids learn their mother tongue (they speak maayat’aan, but, unlike their parents, could not read or write the language). It’s also an effort for Vázquez Gómez herself to learn an Indigenous language as a means to fight their rapid disappearance.
MUSIC Portland Cello Project w/ Maiah Wynne
8PM SAT, MAY 17 | REVOLUTION HALL, $30+
Weezer and Stevie Wonder aren’t the most obvious pairing—perfect for the Portland Cello Project. A fateful gig at the Doug Fir in 2006 launched the ever-evolving group, which is led today by artistic director Valdine Mishkin. It brings cello music to unsuspecting venues (like the Doug Fir, or Rev Hall) and refashions unsuspecting tunes (say, Weezer and Stevie Wonder cuts) as cello music. Folk singer Maiah Wynne, who also plays with Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson in the band Envy of None, is helping out with the genre-bending covers at this gig.
BOOKS Jennifer Hope Choi
7PM MON, MAY 19 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
An excerpt from Choi’s memoir, The Wanderer’s Curse, published by Electric Literature, bears the heading, “I Need a Fortune-Teller Who Can Tell Me if I’ll Become My Mother.” The book’s titular affliction derives from the Korean concept of yeokmasal, a supposedly hereditary wanderlust with a bad rap. For Choi, an editor at Bon Appétit whose essays have been collected in The Best American Travel Writing, yeokmasal might be both congenital and an occupational hazard.
Elsewhere…
- In a hostile climate for arts funding, Portland Center Stage looks for a life raft. (The Oregonian)
- Despite becoming the most public face of recent NEA grant slashing, Portland Playhouse excels in transporting playwright August Wilson’s “deep spiritual wrestling” to the present. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
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