Lorri Ott

Artist Lorri Ott, who lives and works in northeast Ohio, comes to her relatively recent sculptural work with a background in figurative painting, drawing and printmaking.  She has sought in this work to, in her words, “bring color off the wall,” and to experiment with materials, arriving at forms that are constituent with her vibrant use of color. 

Ott’s sculptural pieces recall brightly-hued, highly processed, inorganic, factory-produced detritus, and they appear as living, breathing, organic, delicate, sensuous objects.  In this way, her work embodies duality and tension: order and chaos; rigidity and pliability; the geometric and biomorphic; and continuity and change.  In terms of both color and form, these works are both sound and insubstantial, resolved and in a process of becoming.

Ott experiments widely with materials including latex and silicone rubber.  She enjoys the physical nature of molding, casting, pushing and pulling her malleable materials.  In the genesis of this work, she has insistently sought new uses and applications of substances, and she is receptive to the process of her art making.  In Ott’s mind, her best work results from her “mistakes.”

At a poignant time in her life, Ott found inspiration for her current work as she photographed abandoned plastic bags caught in trees along the highway.  While capturing a certain unexpected beauty that the bags seemed to possess, their restive, undulating, faltering movement became a personal metaphor for melancholy and loss.  Metaphors also for life, these bags possess a translucent skin, filling and deflating—rising and falling—as traffic rushes by.   Materially and sculpturally, the plastic substance of found bags and the voids they articulate, became starting points for this body of work.

Although Ott embraces perceived object or body references in this work, she is also quick to emphasize the importance of abstraction.  As much as her pieces may allude to the body and its organs, they are also vigorously non-referential.  Ott attempts to strike a difficult balance between form that alludes to objects we may recognize, and form that at the same time eludes easy identification.   Abstract form and object-ness, then, are not distinct poles, but form a continuum.  Influenced by the work of Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, Jessica Stockholder and Lynda Benglis, among others, Ott values in her work the notions of simplicity, imperfection, contradiction, play and the use of “happy colors.”

Nicole Havekost

Trained originally as a printmaker, artist Nicole Havekost, who lives and works in Adrian, Michigan, creates totemic cloth and wax dolls and finely-sewn, beaded pouches that humorously and disturbingly reference the appearance and function of the body.

Havekost’s earlier cloth doll series, A few small repairs (1997), originate from the artist’s training and work in fashion design studios, an experience that led her to question assumed notions about beauty and the body.  The perfection implicit in the fashion apparel industry led her to create loosely-defined, misshapen doll forms from stuffed, unadorned muslin cloth.   According to Havekost, “exposed, ugly and deformed seemed a perfect way for her [the doll] to be.”  In their rudimentary, twisted facial features, and in their bloated, distended organs and fluids, the dolls and their disquieting corporeal characteristics are an expression of the physical and psychological imperfection the artist felt growing up.

The Candy Lady series (2002) is a direct reflection of Havekost’s personal “obsession” with all varieties of sugar candies, which she happily confesses are hoarded throughout her home in zip-lock bags.  The advantage of such sugar-laden foodstuffs is that they are small, bite-sized and cheerfully colored, lending them an innocent, child-like association.   The candy migrates bright and undigested, poking just beneath the translucent skin of the Candy Lady torsos.   On the one hand, we may conclude from these works that sweets cannot be concealed—that as unsparing public admonishment, our personal snacking habits remain visible for all to see.  On the other hand, despite the transparency of their gluttonous choices, these bleached beeswax figures fly off the wall, seeming to possess unselfconscious good humor and agency.

Underlying all of Havekost’s work is a dichotomous attraction and repulsion to the body and its appearance, and to the function of its internal organs and glands.  Her labor-intensive Seed Bead series (2001-2004), employing individually-sewn, colored seed beads, takes its inspiration from women’s bead purses and the scientific illustration of dissected organs such as the stomach, digestive system, gall bladder, tongue and adrenal glands. By employing sewing and embroidery—traditional avenues for women’s work—to illustrate body parts, Havekost co-opts and complicates these gendered craft conventions.  We tend to regard such subject matter with reserve and perhaps distaste, yet Havekost purposefully “feminizes” her seed-bead organ constructions.  By enveloping this work within a precious craft tradition, the artist’s anatomical subject matter becomes layered, enigmatic and playful.