At AS220's Project Space (93 Mathewson Street, through November 24), Laurent Bonetto displays handsome new stoneware and earthenware ceramics. There are small milky gray cups and jars with brown rims, glossy off-white plates marked by brown or gray splotches, and cups and little jugs swirled with buttery tan and gray. These are standard, well-made vessels with hints of Asian influence, and an affinity to the colors and textures of earth.Jamey Morrill's exhibit "Larvae," at Yellow Peril (60 Valley Street, Providence, through December 9) features green soda bottles, studded with screws and bound into clusters with webs of white string. Here he groups these bottle-molecules together into a line that curves across the gallery floor and then climbs partway up the white wall.
Morrill has been making these soda bottle sculptures for some years now. He showed similar versions with red string at Rhode Island College's Bannister Gallery in 2009 and at Above Providence Optical Gallery in 2010. They're fun when you first see them, and there's something irresistible about that bottle green, but three years on their novelty fades. And you might wonder, what else has Morrill to add?
The bottle sculptures are part of a promising line of work Morrill has now and again explored: sculpting in the synthetic materials of today — PVC pipe, plastic bottles, duct tape. (In a novel touch inspired by recycling, the gallery is selling sections of this installation by the pound.) The intriguing question these works can pose: what new sculptural forms are suggested by these ubiquitous new materials?
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, AS220, Main Gallery
