When You Cut Into the Present, the Future Leaks Out

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

'When You Cut Into the Present, the Future Leaks Out’* and when a pandemic cuts into immersive, installation-based ceramic practices over a period of multiple years and across vast geographies, videos leak out. While the future feels wildly uncertain and there is no such thing as ‘going back to normal’, Yewen Dong, Magdolene Dykstra, Nicole Seisler, and Linda Swanson make their way through time by engaging in cumulative processes, slowly. Each artist uses repetition as a method to construct work that is never finished and perpetually undone. As ceramic artists, they respond to the current moment of societal, ecological, and personal change as the material does—by being present in a constant state of flux. While this state could be understood as one of precarity, it is also one of infinite potential. Intangibility, impermanence, and deterioration are necessary elements for creating new approaches and perspectives. *William S. Burroughs, 1914

ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

Yewen, Magdolene, Nicole, and Linda created this mind map as a collaborative tool for gathering ideas, tracking the strands that connect their practices, and making their ongoing conversation concrete across time and space (from China to Canada to the US). The map is translated here, by designer Mat Dunlap, into an interactive exhibition through which viewers can float or land with a click and a scroll.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Magdolene Dykstra is an artist and educator. Dykstra’s practice focuses on exploring the tension between growth and decay, order and chaos, individuality and the multiplicity of our species, visibility and anonymity. Her methodology centres around repetitive actions that lead to an accumulation of small components within intricate, shifting ecosystems using materials that embody a relationship with the Earth, its forms, and processes. After studying biology and visual arts in undergraduate degrees, she received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Magdolene has been awarded several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Notable exhibitions include site-specific installations at the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON) and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery (Waterloo, ON), as well as solo exhibitions at the Jane Hartsook Gallery (New York, NY) and A-B Projects (Los Angeles, CA). www.magdolenedykstra.com
@magidykstra

Yewen Dong was born and grew up in Shenzhen, a coastal city in China. She received her BA in Art Design from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013. Continuing her education at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she received her MFA in Ceramics in 2017. Her art practice integrates ceramics, clay drawing and video. She lives and works in Jingdezhen. www.dongyewen.com
@yewenndong

Nicole Seisler is a Los Angeles-based ceramic artist who investigates time, materiality, process, and the overlapping roles of artist/viewer/participant/collaborator. Nicole has exhibited widely at museums ranging from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. Her book Recipes for Conceptual Clay (in the time of covid-19) was published in 2020 and she had a 2021 solo exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, CA. Nicole received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has taught ceramics for over a decade at universities including SAIC, University of Washington, and half a dozen schools in the LA area. Nicole is the Founder and Director of A-B Projects, a space for exhibitions and alternative education in conceptual ceramics. www.nysprojects.com
@nicole_seisler www.a-bprojects.com
@a_bprojects

Linda Swanson is an artist whose interests are grounded in the metamorphic nature of ceramic materials and processes. Her work engages the enigmatic properties of matter at an elemental level and the capacity of wonder to question how and what we know. Her raw and kiln fired ceramic works have been exhibited in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia including Beautés Equivoques at the Bernardaud Foundation in Limoges, France, RAW at the Gardiner Museum in Canada, New Orientalia at the Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan, Omphalos at A-B Projects in Los Angeles, the Cluj Biennale of Ceramics in Romania and ArtPairs with the Galerie Maria Lund in France and Entangled Fragilities at La Guilde in Montreal. She has done residencies at the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands, at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark and presently at Louisiana State University in the US. Her work has been supported with grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, CALQ, FRQSC, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Windgate Charitable Foundation and the Saltonstall Foundation. Swanson graduated with an MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University in New York in 2005, and subsequently taught at Alfred University, the Kansas City Art Institute and currently at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. www.lindaswansonstudio.com
@swansonstudii