Andrea Gill, John Gill, Tony Marsh at Harvey Preston Gallery, Aspen

Andrea Gill, John Gill, Tony Marsh at Harvey Preston Gallery, Aspen

October 17 – December 1, 2020

Harvey Preston Gallery is pleased to present a three-person exhibition featuring works by ceramic artists Andrea Gill, John Gill, and Tony Marsh. This exhibition focuses on the ways in which each artist forefronts color as a means of either cloaking or defining physical form. The platform of the ‘vessel’ functions as an anchor, inviting communion while also tempting the viewer with layers of pure compositional pleasure.

Andrea Gill’s intricately constructed sculptures embrace shape, color, and pattern to define elegant silhouettes. The matte texture and palette combined with smooth, hand-built curvatures suggest layers of fabric, meant to adorn the body or the home. Her work requires careful control in the building phase and multiple firings. Andrea strives to “connect the emotional, visceral and retinal with a moment of peace, perhaps even joy.”

Andrea Gill, Breathing Out, 2020, Earthenware, engobes, glaze, 23 x 18 x 8″

While John Gill’s work is rooted in the realm of function, the object expands beyond its immediate form. Angular projections glide seamlessly into fields saturated in abutting hues, all in the service of creating bold structures that simultaneously reference the medium’s enduring history, as well as, the histories of sculpture, design and painting. There is a playful exuberance in the work that uses color and shape to redirect the eye in unexpected ways.

John Gill, Large Vase #1, 2020, Stoneware, glaze, 16.25 x 10 x 8.75″

As an operating mode, Tony Marsh’s process employs “artistic decision-making that favors chance and the unknowable outcome”. His is a method allowing leeway for the ‘magic’ of the kiln to guide each piece resulting in an appearance of aged, yet timeless tangibility. A notable dichotomy of the work is that it comes across as soft and pliable, to the eye, yet each vessel is hardened due to the many firings, layers of glaze and the nature of fired clay. There is a pushpull balance to the work—the tug of the solid against a certain kind of weightlessness, the natural juxtaposed with the manmade, and the sensitive sustained by physicality.