Tony Marsh: Like Water Uphill @ The Pit In Glendale, California

Tony Marsh’s Like Water Uphill consists of eleven of Marsh’ ceramic works from his ongoing Crucible and Cauldron series. Marsh’s practice fixates on the long history of the creation of vessels. His method of production is predicated on the acceptance of failure, and an interest in the unpredictable. As a medium, ceramics are known for their fragile nature, not just their delicate nature after having been fired, but also their tendency to collapse, explode, crack, or fall apart while the clay is still wet or during the firing process. The ability to overcome these obstacles, and adhere to chemical and compositional constraints is often times what warrants the success of the finished piece. However, Marsh’s approach in his Crucible and Cauldron works embraces discovery and ultimately searches for unpredictable outcomes. The works are built up from multiple applications of mineral mixtures, different glazes, pigments, and even found scraps of other ceramic material. Like Water Uphill is on view through December 14th at The Pit 918 Ruberta Ave, Glendale. photographs courtesy of the artist and The Pit

Mindy Shapero's Aesthetics of Accumulation in "Second Sleep" @ The Pit

Mindy Shapero’s anthropomorphic sculptures are like figures emerging from such night visions. Imagined though also strangely familiar, her large-scale works are totemic, suggesting archeological ruins or manifestations of Jungian archetypes. Made with humble materials like spray paint and bits of hand-painted cut paper alongside more opulent materials like richly pigmented felt and gold leaf, it is Shapero’s aesthetics of relentless accumulation that give her works their energy, as hundreds upon thousands of tiny bits grow into human and architecturally scaled objects. Portals and radiating forms, concentric rings and infinite stripes, a hypnagogic hallucination of shapes and colors beckon us into what might be the artist’s dreaming mind turned inside out in a flash of infinity. Second Sleep is on view through June 10 at The Pit 918 Ruberta Avenue, Glendale. photographs by Lani Trock

Laurie Nye Envisions Multiple Realities in "Venusian Weather" @ The Pit

In Venusian Weather, Nye explores humanity’s struggle to control its relationship with nature via the Andromedans’ perception of environmental disaster on Earth. As a student of mythology and science fiction alike, Nye looks both backward and forward, challenging the notion of linear time in the centerpiece of Venusian Weather, an architecturally-scaled, cosmographical frieze that describes what is and what has been at stake on Earth through the Andromedan gaze. Inspired by Mark von Schlegell’s 2005 novel Venusia, Nye portrays the world as a hologram, represented in her paintings as gridded non-spaces that recall Star Trek’s holodeck virtual reality environments. The grids mingle with and interrupt depictions of transformation and flux amid multiple realities. Nye’s brightly hued, eloquently painted compositions conflate the chaos of present-day Earth with dreams of a radiant future on Venusia in a hopeful vision of love, peace, and environmental harmony. Venusian Weather is on view through June 10 at The Pit 918 Ruberta Ave, Glendale. photographs by Lani Trock