Porcelain
Parables
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| A summer Breeze and a Golden Necklace |
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| The Future Is Bright |
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| These Are Barren Times |
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| Our Collective Existential Crisis |
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| The Taste of Fleeting Success |
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| Black Bear Thoughts |
By
Tom Wachunas
To
every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven… -
Ecclesiastes 3:1
“I
create narratives using personal experience combined with animal interactions
and semiotics…I strive to reveal human realities by exposing both the light and
shadow parts of life…” -Taylor Robenalt
EXHIBIT: SYMBOLIC NARRATIVE: CERAMICS BY TAYLOR
ROBENALT / at The Canton Museum of Art (CMA), 1001 Market Avenue N. / THROUGH AUGUST 2, 2020 / Hours: Tuesdays-Fridays 10a.m. to 4p.m. / FREE
ADMISSION THROUGH AUG.2 / 330.453.7666 /
visitors should pre-schedule their viewing time and reserve tickets at
From
Merriam-Webster, definition of semiotics:
a general philosophical theory of signs
and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially
constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and
pragmatics.
Though I’m
fairly certain that this exhibit was planned well before the onset of the Covid
crisis, it nevertheless resonates with our time - this protracted season of intense societal
flux. We’re living in a complicated, dystopian era, poised at a volatile nexus
of viral anguish and consuming desire for healing and redemption.
Taylot
Robenalt is a storyteller. Viewed collectively, her porcelain objects are a
compelling sculptural treatise on the human experience of life’s dichotomies,
life’s challenging dualities. Her exquisitely crafted pieces merge figure, flora, and fauna into intriguing
metaphors. These are codified narratives – symbols, totems, shrines, memorials.
They’re emotive reflections on embracing the human spirit - at once fragile and
robust, vulnerable and indomitable - as it navigates all manner of existential
circumstances.
To be fully alive is to be touched by the
inevitability of cycles, of change - to experience a journey into light, into
darkness, and back again. There are
stories here rendered in the dulled colors of mourning, of corruptibility and
mortality, such as These Are Barren
Times, or Our Collective Existential
Crisis.
There are also brighter episodes of purity, or
hope, or joy, such as in A Summer Breeze
and a Golden Necklace. Yet, look closely at the woman’s face (the artist’s
self-portrait?). She appears about to cry. Is her golden crown on the verge of
falling off? Even the graceful white swan looks like it’s snarling, as if to
say this moment won’t last. Likewise, in The
Future is Bright, there’s still an abiding sense of the temporary, of
precarious balancing. The woman’s expression is subtly serious, even stern, locked
in concentrated determination to savor all that delicate, beautiful fertility
atop her head before it becomes...what? And so it goes, this circle, this yin
and yang of being.
Through
all their intricate forms, sumptuous textures, and lustrous hues, Robenalt’s
porcelain musings exude a strange charm, unsettling and disarming at the same
time. Here are eloquent parables about the eternally changeable seasons of
being alive.
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