I have been curious about fellow grad at CCA, Carlos Ramirez's, ceramic work for some time. Within our large program, Carlos and I have never been in a critique class together so I have never had much of a chance to investigate his work, but I have seen it peeking out of his studio since the beginning of school. The other day his ceramic video game-shaped sculptures were hung in a project space out in a main lobby and I was able to check out some of the details of his pieces. I asked if he could send me a few pictures and then I went into his studio to take snap more photos.
What I love about the work is that it is so unusual- you don't see much ceramic work that looks this contemporary. Often, ceramics are banished into a "craft ghetto", where artists sell pots and vases at craft fairs, or make seemingly identical, badly sculpted blobby figurative sculptures. Contrary to this, using the narrative of anthropomorphic shapes most of us recall from childhood, with neon-colored plexiglass to mimic the geometric movements of the game shapes, his pieces are both beautifully colored with lovely cracks, refreshingly funny, and semi-nostalgic. See his website
here.
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| Looking into his studio |
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| Inspirational source material |
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| A piece on the wall |
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| Close-up |
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| Work station with candy |
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| Candy and toys: necessities |
For this particular body of work below, Carlos says: "In this series of work, Crushing Nickels Into Quarters, I draw from imagery of 1980s video games, Meso-American architecture, and Minimalism to make sculptural work in reference to transitional times in coming of age".
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| Untitled (Black stripe) |
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| Untitled (Pink stripe) |
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| Untitled (Yellow stripe) |
See my post on Southern Exposure's juried show,
Boom, for another piece by Carlos.
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