Shœings
July 22, 2022 - August 27, 2022
Monaco is pleased to present Shœings, an exhibition of ceramics, works on paper, and paintings by Erin Tyler (Springfield, MO), Emily Mueller (St. Louis, MO), and Kelsey Hamilton Davis (currently: Skælskør, Denmark), organized by Monaco member, artist, and curator Kalaija Mallery.
Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, July 22, from 6 to 9 p.m. The exhibition will run through August 27, 2022, with viewings available on Saturdays from 12 to 4 p.m. and by appointment.
Click here to view the Shœings Checklist for information and pricing on the works in the exhibition.
For all inquiries and appointments please contact: Kalaija Mallery at kalaija.mallery@gmail.com, or Monaco at info@monacomonaco.us
The definition of practice is an intentional return to something. Encapsulation, reconciliation. A hazelnut. A rock.
The three artists exhibited in Shœings present process-based practices as an intuitive, intrinsic way of making, perhaps working in contradiction to the more logical contemporary receptions of art that privilege qualitative research, objective fact, a more masculine tradition of knowledge-creation. Such stunning corporeal deviation is rooted in antithetical chaos and devotion. It is not to be tamed, it cannot be taught.
Kelsey Hamilton Davis cites her ceramic practice as automatic and auto-theoretical, using Nature as an intentionally vague term to counter a “New England Civility” that connotes her upbringing. She extends her process in and within the natural world as a means of untangling the unanswerable and unsolvable reckonings of inherited colonial archetypes, while leaving room still for magic, for pleasure, and for these contradictions to exist simultaneously. Her work occupies several states: of her studio, of the gallery, of the home. In such a manner, her sculptures may travel and traverse tradition with almost a mind of their own. The works were made for this exhibition while on residence at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark.
Emily Mueller uses process as a mode of translation, with specific attention to digital and material worlds. Her mark-making is suggestive of both pixels and brush strokes and is guided responsively by the studio world around her (which she fills with song lyrics, snippets of narrative text, and researched existential photo theory). Small traces of her built textual world appear scratched in pencil alongside the works: a somber playfulness, freedom, and evidence of their origin woven throughout. Layering and shaping the paper, which she makes herself, becomes intuitive assemblage: the resulting drawings are reminiscent of Byzantine mosaics that somehow appeared organically from the pulp.
Erin Tyler balances experimentation, chance, and studious repetition to let go of control and succumb to a higher mode of inspiration in her practice. The integration of these chance elements allows for play and discovery and for her to “let go” of ultimate control over how the work forms – a trust that echoes the described God-Faith that once empowered her mother to speak to storms and have visions in the night. Trusting process as a state of inspiration itself guides this work beyond sensible design toward a hidden range of emotion and possibility. The resulting paintings remit forms of abstraction that elucidate greater emotional and existential states.
In practice, these three contemporaries join what I understand to be a movement of New Transcendentalists: artists who create to connect to something higher than material – the ineffable. The resulting works may simply become artifacts of such processes and perhaps are imbued with the trace of this energy, or may become rendered entirely inanimate. The process of creation in and of itself echoes and demonstrates that of sound waves, of seances, of rare moments of unitive consciousness, where we may have fleeting moments of recognition of the Great Design, and see that “it is good.”
“Then he showed me a small thing, the size of a hazelnut, nestled in the palm of my hand. It was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eyes of my understanding and thought What can this be? And the answer came to me: It is all that is created. I was amazed that it could continue to exist. It seemed to me to be so little that it was on the verge of dissolving into nothingness.”
Julian of Norwich, 14th cent. The Showings
For all inquiries and appointments please contact: Kalaija Mallery at kalaija.mallery@gmail.com, or Monaco at info@monacomonaco.us
BIOS
Kelsey Hamilton Davis is an artist, writer, and educator born and raised in New England. Hamilton Davis’s works in clay are created through an automatic process of touching and holding shapes into becoming. She works with the intention that these forms will hold and contain, acting as functional objects for more ephemeral pleasures. Inspired by memory, vague narratives of colonial aesthetics, and how these nostalgic notions of lineage interact with the simultaneously ancient and contemporary body, she creates domestic objects through an intuitive and primal compulsion to make something with dirt. Hamilton Davis received her MFA degree from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2021. She has shown work and completed residencies both locally and internationally and is currently living and working as a Young Artist in Residence at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Skælskør, Denmark.
@kelseyhamiltondavis_art
Erin Tyler received a BFA degree in painting and a BS degree in education from Missouri State University and will join the MFA - Visual Studies program in the Fall of 2022. She began her self-led art practice with detail-focused representational drawings in pencil and charcoal. Her current art practice involves abstraction through painting and collage and often relies on found objects, systematic art-making processes, experimentation, and chance. Erin has worked as a Teaching Artist at The Springfield Art Museum and the Missouri Fine Arts Academy and is currently working as a studio artist.
@erintylerstudio
Emily Mueller is a multimedia artist working primarily with photography and drawing. Her conceptual interests lie in the similarities between digital and physical mark-making. Based in Saint Louis, she teaches photography and graphic design at Lindenwood University and drawing and painting to kids around the city. Mueller has exhibited work in both online and physical publications as well as in galleries in California and Missouri. She received her MFA degree from Washington University in Saint Louis and her BA degree from University of San Diego. In her free time, she can be found drawing on the couch with her cat Ferris.
@ferris_muellerz
For all inquiries and appointments please contact: Kalaija Mallery at kalaija.mallery@gmail.com, IG: @kalaija.m
or Monaco at info@monacomonaco.us, IG: @monaco_usa