Ehren Tool: Production or Destruction / Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, USA
May 27 – September 9, 2012
Former Marine and ceramist Ehren Tool exhibits war awareness work at CAFAM.
Opening reception: Saturday, May 26, 6 – 9 pm.
“The best way to destroy your enemy is to make him your friend.” – Abraham Lincoln
Coinciding with Memorial Day, the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) presents Ehren Tool: Production or Destruction, a solo exhibition of ceramist and former Marine, Ehren Tool. Emblazoned with the haunting imagery of armed conflict, Tool creates handmade ceramic cups as a medium to address war and the violent rhetoric and imagery used to perpetuate it. The exhibition will feature 1,000 handcrafted cups, video, installation, photographs, and printed materials.
Twenty years after his service in the first Gulf War, Tool’s firsthand contact with the reality of war is manifest in the thousands of cups he dutifully produces. The cups will be exhibited at CAFAM in “units” based on military formations of “squads” (13), “platoons” (55), and “companies” (225), serving as a visual reminder of each Marine within a military unit. Each cup is uniquely crafted, decorated with ceramic decals of soldiers’ photos, propaganda, war porn, and sculptural reliefs shaped like bombs, guns, or medals.
Recent events such as the Occupy movements and the incendiary language of current election campaigns figure strongly in his new work, as well as veteran suicides and stories of U.S. Marines desecrating bodies of the deceased. Other imagery alludes to the culpability of video games, toys, and pornography in desensitizing the public to the emotional toll of war.
Tool insists that his art is not anti-war, and prefers to characterize it as “war awareness” work. “It is not my intention to teach or preach. It is not possible to communicate the pain, waste, or intensity of war. My work deals with the uneasy collision, and collusion, between military and civilian cultures,” he says.
By putting people in contact with the imagery of war through an everyday household item, he hopes to make people think more often about war and it’s consequences in a meaningful way. “Letter to President Obama” (2009) is among the several letters he wrote to national and corporate heads urging them to consider the outcome of supporting continued war efforts. He also sent a cup to each of these leaders, which elicited responses from politicians such as Karl Rove.
Though the cups are functional drinking vessels, they are also memory objects that contain unspoken stories about fallen soldiers and wounded survivors. The installation “393” (2004) is a striking display of 393 shattered cups that represent the number of U.S. combat casualties during the first year of the second Gulf War. In the video “1.5 Second War Memorial,” a different cup is shot to pieces every 1.5 seconds, each signifying a soldier or civilian who has died in a war.
Tool will be on-site at CAFAM for an artist residency between June 1 and June 15, where he will set up a ceramic studio in the courtyard to encourage public conversations and share his work in progress. He will be giving away all the cups he makes at CAFAM.
Ehren Tool served with the 1st Marine Division during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He attended Pasadena City College and the University of Southern California on the G.I. Bill and received his Master of Fine Arts in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, CA in 2004. Tool is a visiting lecturer of ceramics in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Bongoüt Showroom, Berlin, Germany; Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster, OH; and most recently at Project Slogan in Aberdeen, Scotland. Tool is a 2010 United States Artists Fellow in Crafts and Traditional Arts.
CAFAM will host an opening reception for Ehren Tool: Production or Destruction on Saturday, May 26 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.
This exhibition is generously sponsored by The Antonia and Vladimir Kulaev Cultural Heritage Fund and The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation.
Public programming:
There will be several exhibition-related programs and workshops during the run of the exhibition, including an artist residency at CAFAM with Ehren Tool.
Friday, June 1 – Friday, June 15 / Artist Residency with Ehren Tool
During museum hours
Thursday, June 7 / Etsy Craft Night with Combat Paper Project
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 9 – Sunday, June 10 / Collaborative Papermaking with Combat Paper Project
12:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, August 19 / Artist Talk with Ehren Tool
3:00 p.m.
The Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) engages people through its diverse exhibitions and programs that challenge established ideas about craft and folk art and inspire a sense of inquiry and creativity within all people. Located on Los Angeles’ historic Miracle Mile, it is the city’s only institution exclusively dedicated to celebrating craft, design and folk art. CAFAM works to recognize emerging artists and make art accessible to all audiences, serving as a forum in which art can be presented and described by the artists and communities who create it.
In addition to the exhibitions on view, CAFAM hosts the Shop@CAFAM, an on-site and online shopping experience that features fair-trade art and handicrafts from local and global artists and artisans who are rooted in both traditional and contemporary craft.
Admission: FREE on the first Wednesday of every month. Regularly: $7 for adults; $5 for students and seniors; free for CAFAM members.
Hours: Tuesday – Friday, 11am – 5pm; Saturday/Sunday, 12pm – 6 pm; closed Mondays.
Museum Tours: For group tour information, call 323-937-4230.
CONTACT
Sasha Ali, Exhibitions Coordinator
pr@cafam.org
Tel. 323-937-4230 x25
Craft and Folk Art Museum
5814 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
United States
www.cafam.org
Above: Ehren Tool, 393, Installation view, 2004, Stoneware with glaze and ceramic decals. Photo by Ian Martin. Courtesy of the artist.
