Vessel

Dairy Arts Center| 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, Colorado 80302
December 2, 2022-January 28, 2023 | Curated by Drew Austin
Admission: Free, with a suggested donation of $5

Review by Maggie Sava

When I first took note of the name and theme of the Dairy Arts Center’s current show, Vessel, I found myself wondering if this were not an exhibition I would expect to see in a collecting museum. I imagined a display in which objects from global art history would be put in conversation with one another, with expository labels framing the relationships between the objects across time and space.

Instead, Vessel posed a compelling challenge to my expectations. This substantial show encompassing the work of 19 contemporary artists allows the works themselves to assert the meaning of the show’s namesake, without the need for hefty historical analysis. [1] As a result, the focus lies on what each artist offers up with “vessels” featuring their own distinctive layers of contextuality, referentiality, and significance.

Inherent to the definition of a vessel is the concept of both containment and transport. It describes an entity or object with the ability to simultaneously hold and share. A vessel can range anywhere from the biological (for example, a capillary) to the domestic (such as a bowl) and the industrial (perhaps a ship), all the way to the spiritual (referring to a prophet or messenger of divine transmissions). [2]

The exhibition guide touches upon the vastness of the term, describing how “What is being contained and the container in which it is settled can morph, merge, or disappear completely. Creators are using the vessel as a means to understand something, to contain something, or to put something into a specific place and explore within that space.” [3] That statement alone disrupts my need for additional educational commentary, as the exhibition organizers maintain the vessel as a source of creative ambiguity and indefiniteness. 

Upon entering the Dairy Arts Center, I first encountered thnhdnh’s collection Halfway to Nowhere, located in the MacMillan Family Lobby. The series appears to be a seamless introduction to the show, as the works provide a direct visual entry point to the exhibit: silkscreen prints of bowls, pots, and other “found vessels.” [4] However, thnhdnh’s work encapsulates the driving statement of the show—that the notion of the vessel is not as simple as it seems.

Like the other prints in the series, thnhdnh’s piece Towards Bright Horizons v. 1 (2022) portrays the black silhouette of a functional vessel (a bowl) set against the dynamic, swirling background of marbled jute paper. Upon closer inspection, however, we see that the screenprint contains a miniature world full of natural forms and futuristic architectural structures. The images are filled with delightful details that make the scenes feel inviting and immersive, akin to storybook lands. The texture, surface quality, and design of the paper makes it stand out in its dimensionality—compared to the flatness of the bowl—bringing attention to the paper and the medium (vessel) of the work as means of connection and transfer for the audience.

Delving into the experience of being an immigrant (the artist came to the United States from Vietnam as a child), thnhdnh creates irrealities that become quickly and oddly familiar. As he describes in his artist statement, “In my work, I create liminal spaces, a state of in-between-ness and ambiguity, that encourages transition through fictitious landscapes to explore the reconstruction of cultural identity altered by memories and feelings of displacement and isolation.” [5] 

The liminal spaces successfully create landscapes that you can enter and make your own, at times imparting a sense that you might actually be returning somewhere. The approach thnhdnh takes is particularly resonant, especially if your connection to the lived landscape is complicated by your memory and sense of identity and involves composites of multiple different “homes.” 

The two cornerstones of the show are thndhn’s prints and Heather Leathers’ canvases—both occupy their own galleries and represent their own cohesive collections. However, while thnhdnh uses landscape as his visual language, Leathers’ series Soft Like Armor portrays black-and-white arrangements of abstracted anatomical and botanical forms interspersed with vase-like objects. Surrounding the canvases are plaster casts of objects that evoke illness and hospital stays, including bed frames and crutches.

As Leathers explains, these paintings honor surgeries the artist went through while dealing with chronic illness and “the power our bodies hold to heal, unlearn, relinquish, and forgive without our knowing in order to keep us in the fight.” [6] By representing the experience of living with chronic illness, Leathers asks the question: what if your body, as a vessel, does not function the way it is expected to? And, how might we begin to understand the job or the work of the vessel differently by learning to celebrate it? 

The name Soft Like Armor itself is contradictory yet evocative of the tenderness and softness underscoring the visual language of care in the canvases. Leathers conveys the relationship between softness and protection in the poem she wrote to accompany the canvases: “You’ll spin shields / Porous enough to breathe / Strong enough to forgive / A kingdom of stillness / Soft like armor.” [7]

Moving into the Hand-Rudy Gallery, I found the conversation between the show’s contributors accelerated by the display of several different artists’ works together. This is also the point in the exhibition in which the theme becomes more abstract, with several pieces eschewing the literal imagery of what we may think of as vessels. For example, Evan Mann’s complex and fantastical landscapes transport the viewer into new worlds by acting as playful portals of their own. Mann creates scenes without the inclusion of recognizable forms and he plays with perspective by disrupting our understanding of space, distance, and depth.

In his video Real Ethereal (2014), Mann depicts a mysterious figure emerging onto a surreal planet, sometimes including familiar scenes of nature and other times artificial, spaceship-like rooms. By making his video just over 10 minutes, Mann asks you to take the time to enter into the alien world long enough to warm up to its bizarre features. Yet just before you are able to get truly comfortable, the figure departs by walking out into the ocean, marking our exit as well.

Like thnhdnh and Mann, Tyler Alperin explores place as a vessel in his painting 3 Attics (2022), yet looking instead at how it embodies the essence and memory of someone. In his tribute to “Anne Frank, her stepsister Eva Schloss, Eva’s brother Heinz, their father Erich Geiringer and the good in all of us,” Alperin creates an amalgamation of three different attic spaces, evoking both a specific history and a shared space. This vessel is one in which all are invited to honor, “those millions, not as famous as Anne, who were lost, who we don’t know, and the contributions they did make, we all make, just by being.” [8] 

Alperin uses pronounced brushstrokes and vibrant lines of color to create an lively atmosphere. Much like Van Gogh’s approach in his paintings of interior scenes, Alperin forgoes accuracy in perspective in exchange for emotive expression. As a result, feelings of presence and absence, freedom and captivity, and memory and obscurity push at one another. The artist cleverly depicts the notion of interiority not only as an architectural experience, but a mental and emotional one as well.

I visited the main gallery space—the McMahon Gallery—last. Upon entering, my eye was immediately caught by one of the main focal points of the room: Peter Manion’s large scale painting of a vase, I Am A Joke (2022), which sits opposite the entry doors. At 74 inches by 74 inches (just over six feet by six feet), I Am A Joke looks like a giant fresco embedded in the wall of a contemporary art gallery. 

Manion’s use of plaster on felt creates cracks all along the image of the vase, making it appear as though it comes from antiquity. The work plays upon the tradition of displaying historic pottery as artifacts in museums, where they are removed from their context as functional items and made into aesthetic art objects. Manion takes it one step further, ridding the vase of functional abilities altogether by making it a depiction rather than the “real” thing.

If Manion’s work made me question the artifice of the art object and how it is displayed, Marsha Mack’s piece Rift (2022) takes that idea to a new level. In this installation sitting opposite of Manion’s work, a bright pink ceramic vase resembling a quirky bug with a crown of strawberries and a heart-shaped abdomen sits on a marble pedestal. It is positioned in front of a plastic shower curtain depicting the image of a waterfall in a forest. Here, artifice is at its peak. Even the sugary-sweet style of the vase that resembles a dessert plays upon the question of the fake versus the real.

Mack leverages a fun absurdity in Rift. As she asserts, her work “complicates the relationship between sculpture and grocery shopping.” [9] The playfulness of her bauble-like ceramic sculpture also turned my attention to how I understood the object as a vessel. It is indeed a functional piece, acting as a flower vase, which made me think of the art historical tradition of separating craft and fine art, with greater cultural and narrative significance placed on the latter. 

While this could be a domestic item, it is also a strongly aesthetic work. I could not help but appreciate Mack’s work as a disruption of that categorical act which has historically undermined the artistic contributions of craftspeople and their creation of beautiful yet useful works. And why choose between having them exist in a white cube gallery instead of the “real” world, when you can have (almost) both?

With Vessel, I had expected a meditation on containment and transfer with some cohesive conclusion at the end. The exhibition instead provided many moments of genuine and unexpected connection. In the end, it wrapped up in a pleasantly full open-endedness. By allowing the art to exist as a vessel for its own unique inquiries, the exhibit provides a nuanced experience, not to mention a gratifying variety of styles, media, and subject matter to engage a broad audience.

Maggie Sava (she/her) is an art historian and writer based in Denver. She holds a BA in Art History and English, Creative Writing from the University of Denver and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

[1] The featured artists are Tyler Alpern, Virginia Diaz Saiki, thnhdnh, Personal Geographies (Becky Wareing Steele and Shannon Geis), Jane Glotzer, Andrea Gordon, Dylan Griffith, Brenda Jones, Hannah Leathers, Marsha Mack, Peter Manion, Evan Mann, Layl McDill, Andra Stanton, Lindsay Stripling, Robert Sunderman, Lucas Thomas, and Chase Travaille.

[2] Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “vessel,” accessed December 12, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vessel.

[3] The exhibition guide is conveniently available in both a printed version in the galleries and a digital version on the Dairy Arts Center website. Vessel Exhibition Guide, Dairy Arts Center, accessed December 12, 2022, https://thedairy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Vessel-Exhibition-Guide-Small.pdf. 

[4] thndnh’s Artist Statement in the Vessel Exhibition Guide, Dairy Arts Center, accessed December 12, 2022, https://thedairy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Vessel-Exhibition-Guide-Small.pdf.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Hannah Leathers’ Artist Statement in the Vessel Exhibition Guide, Dairy Arts Center, accessed December 12, 2022, https://thedairy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Vessel-Exhibition-Guide-Small.pdf.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Tyler Alperin’s Artist Statement in the Vessel Exhibition Guide, Dairy Arts Center, accessed December 12, 2022, https://thedairy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Vessel-Exhibition-Guide-Small.pdf.

[9] Marsha Mack’s Artist Statement in the Vessel Exhibition Guide, Dairy Arts Center, accessed December 12, 2022, https://thedairy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Vessel-Exhibition-Guide-Small.pdf.