Gallery MC is pleased to present earth, a four-person sculpture exhibition of artists using porcelain, clay, stone, marble and metal. The artists include Phoenix Lindsay-Hall, Gorazd Poposki, Don Porcaro and Elise Siegel.

The umbrella of material and process seems at first the obvious tie that binds these artists together. But there is something more, something poetic in the ways in which each one’s relationship to their materials and methodologies defines the outcome. While they each have very different things to say, they share a reverence for an obsessive, hands-on process that all great craftsmanship requires. In the midst of a burgeoning and ongoing digital revolution, this desire to privilege the hand is a rare commodity and something wonderful to behold.“Shepard,” Phoenix Lindsey-Hall’s large-scale porcelain sculpture is modeled after the wooden fence where Matthew Shepard was brutally attacked and left for dead in October 1998. Eighteen years after this iconic and cruel hate crime, Lindsey-Hall has recreated a symbol of struggle to remember those who have been lost in the fight for equality. That she chose to create a full-scale fence in porcelain is not lost on the subtleties of contradiction. The material’s inherent fragility is on one hand a metaphor for the plight of the disenfranchised, while on the other, it is the last thing one equates with wooden logs constructed to mark divisions. Its whiteness is both haunting and beautiful, and an enticement to draw one closer to its surface. But the fence’s form is crude and precarious, leaving us uneasy at the likeliness of its breaking.

Don Porcaro’s “Talismans” are at once both regal and whimsical. In a departure from the traditional assumptions about stone sculpture, which is that it is reductive in nature, Porcaro builds volume rather than carves it away. His stacking and layering of different stones resemble core samples dug up from the depths, revealing to us the passing of geological time and cultural histories. But they are also totemic. They have feet, which place them firmly in the realm of figuration and give them animation. Their brass “heads” and “necks” extend the associations to embrace everything from Middle Eastern hookahs to Venetian perfume atomizers, and African jewelry. They are, as the term “talisman” refers to, like mysterious figures with magical properties that would bring good luck to those who touch them, and their sheer physical sensuousness invites us to do just that.

Earth
Gallery MC
549 West 52nd Street, New York, NY 10019
On View Now to March 12, 2016
Closing Reception, Friday March 11, 6-8pm