Required Reading

"Film stills don't quite do justice to Sharmistha Ray's Emergent Realities, a three-channel animation that fuses Buddhist and Hindu symbols, digital units of measurement, and cosmic diagrams to draw us into an experience that is, by design, both personal and universal. The piece goes on view tomorrow at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Wood Street Galleries, accompanied by a composition by Pakistani musician Arooj Aftab (whom I recently had the privilege of seeing perform live)."

"While Cammie Staros's vessels resemble those of the Greeks in shape, color, and decorative style, none of them look quite "right" according to typical standards. All hand-built, they wobble and swell, with lumpy bellies and lopsided handles cocked like errant elbows. Some look like they're melting, as if blasted by the tectonic forces of the earth; others are inverted, well-formed, but simply turned upside down on their mouths. "I came to ceramics because I was obsessed with Greek figure vases," Staros explains. "I was thinking about language, objects, and bodies, and the various relationships between them." To interrogate the Greek vessel was to investigate the origin story, as she's called it, of Western art history.To call renewed attention to these vessels, to their historic meanings and implications, Staros disrupts them. Reclining Nude (2015)-a reference to the many nudes of the Western canon-literally lounges, propped on its side and supported by one of its spindly handles, on a white wooden pedestal that mimics an ancient column."

Sharmistha Ray's Emergent Realities is a three-channel animation that fuses Buddhist and Hindu symbols, digital units of measurement, and cosmic diagrams to create an experience that is both personal and universal, accompanied by a composition by Pakistani musician Arooj Aftab. Women ceramicists produce hand-built vessels that deliberately subvert classical Greek forms, creating wobbling, inverted, and reclining shapes that interrogate origins of Western art history and reframe object-body relationships. Cammie Staros's works mimic Greek vases but appear intentionally 'not right' through swelling bellies, lopsided handles, melting surfaces, and inverted orientations. Additional subjects include India's drag scene, efforts to preserve olive trees in Gaza, dystopian airport lounge artworks, Jenny Holzer's early domestic connections, and the historical origins of "Jingle Bells."

Read at Hyperallergic