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Jeannie Mah: CHIAROSCURO
In her choice of a sexy art historical adjective for a title, Jeannie Mah
disrupts a persistent art historical soliloquy which has excluded ceramics.
Chiaroscuro is a painters' term to describe the treatment of light and shade
in a painting or a drawing to produce an illusion of depth or a dramatic effect.
Aside from the obvious introduction to the two contrasting components of the
installation, Chiaroscuro is an ironic title. Jeannie Mah's objects are
three - dimensional: the illusion of her tableau is that they read, initially,
as two-dimensional. Framed and glazed by the display cases, they appear to be two
carefully composed paintings. As one looks more closely, the three dimensionality
of Jeannie Mah's ethereal cups asserts itself, although the paper - thin, translucent
and weightless objects are physically separate from the utilitarian world.
One of the tableaux is a store display berserk with energy and colour; the other
resembles a staid display in an historical museum. The
allusion to the museum is not wholly incidental to the
reading of the work. The ceramics, gesturing mutely from behind and through the glass,
are part of Jeannie Mah's continuing investigation which found its beginning in a museum
visit.
I was in Crete in the spring of 1982 when a little ceramic cup
(Kamares Wares Cup of Middle Minoan Crete, 1600 - 1400 BC)
caught my eye. Because my thoughts were on more hedonistic pleasures, I did not fully register
the effect that it was to have on me.
This ordinary, humble, personal, utilitarian cup symbolized the concept of
home, of comfort and sustenance, a respite from the outside
world of society and politics, a sanctuary in which to replenish one's physical and mental
needs so as to better cope with the exterior world.
Perversely, I started to glorify this cup. I imitated it in exaggerated and grandiose ways.
I put it on a pedestal. I made a room to enshrine it. I drew its shadow, looming largely on
the wall behind it. I miniaturized it and made it more fragile with patterns that pierced its
walls.
The culmination of this investigation is the subject of the two tableaux in the Dunlop
Art Gallery display cases.
... OSCURO ... hearkens back to the roots of euro-centric culture: the Minoans. Subdued,
sombre, static, the larger of the two display cases has been lined with thin paper, softened
and darkened by the rubbing of graphite into the surface. These gray cups are Jeannie Mah's
refabrications of the functional, homely object she encountered in 1982. They are stand - ins
for another era: their exaggerated fragility clarifies that they would have never survived the
passage of time intact. A broken cup, its shards carefully arranged to an approximation of its
original contour, occupies centre stage and pointedly underscores the dangerous journey of
ceramic objects through the selective reconstruction of history. Several cups are mounted
on faux classical cornices, mimicking the museum's tasks of preserving and legitimizing
chosen objects. Her installation poses the question of what is not included in museums
as well as putting a complex conceptual spin on the physicality of the ceramic object:
The black cups were like the memory of a cup, an imprint burned into our retina,
relating more to Plato's world of `idea' or `form,' and of the essence of `cupness'. These
cups were more mysterious and sombre, not quite in our reality. In their black and almost
near - invisible state, they took on a predominance that real objects in our day - to - day
world lack., for we understand real objects as concepts; we do no know them in our
physicality.
Although the objects are intended for contemplation rather than physical use, it is
difficult to see them, obscured as they are by the tenebres of historical memory.
... CHIARO ... is an immediate contrast. The sombre colours and static forms have been
replaced by elegant - mannered - cups, brightly coloured and precariously posed. They are the
chimeras engineered from Jeannie Mah's quiet pilfering of decorative and ceramic
history. The elongated form developed as much from ancient vases
as from haute couture of 1950's dresses. The motifs decorating the surfaces of the
vessels were taken from Minoan and 18th century French sources and the saturated yellows and
blues colouring all but the two white vessels flanking the installation were lifted from the
characteristic colours of the Sèvres porcelain factory near Paris. Vessels in drag? Despite
their recombinant historical sources, these vessels cavort and pirouette. They are marked with
spiraling, wiry, eccentric handles. It is difficult not to anthropomorphize these objects as
the characters in a melodrama. They operate as players or as dancers within a decorative
mise-en-scène.
There are several directions the plot may take in Jeannie Mah's ceramic melodrama. The
surface motifs, colours and markings as well as the unusual bases and handles, are teasing
allusions to historical decoration. In a sense, these vessels are parodies of historical
ceramics and question our expectations of ceramic form and the troubled relationship between
sculpture and dinnerware, function and decoration, autonomy and context. Looking at them from
another point of view, these vessels carry overtly feminine affectations, from their decorative
qualities, to their unusual siting within a domestic environment, to the corporeal parallels
which can be drawn to the body. As well, there is a persistent contradiction marking
Jeannie Mah's work: the enigmatic nature of her objects is at odds with
the obsessive precision of their construction. This is apparent in the anti-vessel which stands
upright among the refined rubble at the bottom of the smaller display case. It has no opening,
emphatically negating its functionality. Formally, the anti-vessel is the pivot point for the
compositional vortex and conceptually acts as a footnote to the non-utility of Jeannie Mah's
creations. Too 'finished' and too frenetic to read as prototypes, these porcelain constructions
are highly considered physical interpretations of 'vessel'.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Chiaroscuro is that it is insistently
temporal. The exaggerated fragility of her vessels, the memento mori shards on the floor
below them and the subtle historical references in the work, all underscore a preoccupation with
the passage of time. Her ceramics and shards, theatrically installed within lit and self -
conscious sets, suggests a discontinuous narrative. She calls them allegorical vessels. Jeannie
Mah's has contrived a field of open-ended gestures -- albeit in the static form of fired
porcelain -- which read as a transhistorical mimesis embracing Bronze Age and Rococco periods
as well as the here and now. The viewer vacillates between the actuality of the vessel and what
it represents.
By "... approaching the imagination through reality," the vessels,
through mimesis, are pushed to the limits of their materiality, past the literal and physical
breaking point.
Through memory of image, fragmented forms from history exist only to shatter,
then regroup again in varied permutations, as they evolve once more from their metaphysical
state.
These chronically elusive cups hold a lot of water.
Helen Marzolf
Director / Curator
Dunlop Art Gallery |
