Clay Paper Wood
June Steingart Gallery, Laney College
900 Fallon St.
Oakland
Through March 26, 2025
Saena Folta “Not A Chair”. Plywood stepstool.
This is not a chair.
This, however, is a hat.
Featuring the works of more than 20 advanced students in the Ceramics, Printmaking, and Wood Technology classes at Laney College, the current show “Clay Paper Wood” offers a variety of objects and prints to ogle and admire, examine deeply and chuckle at. A sense of humor pervades — with the exception of one or two artists — with cheeky titles (“Not A Chair,” “Attempted Murder”), self-effacing self-portraits, and unrecognizable yet clearly biologically inspired ceramics on display, ready for consumption, and in some cases, purchase.
The pieces that spoke most loudly were those positioning their raw materials and craftsmanship at the forefront, their warped shapes and lines mimicking the soft curves of a body, bright splays of wood grain or molten glass glaze. Jo Ko’s brittle but strong ceramics sat pooled in light, spiny and pocked, shiny and gaping, slumped, sloping.
Jo Ko
Organs or illness, otherworldly but born of our earth, the clay and glass would seem at home on all manner of surfaces, their colors reflecting their surroundings. Ko draws inspiration from “femininity…unknown ambiguous forms…botany… [and the] beauty that evolves through the various stages of mortality,” the shapes living and dying at once. I would still very much like to hold them. Cheri Mims “Cloche” (pictured at top), also fashioned of clay and inspired by botany and human form, offered a more literal take while maintaining a natural palette, ballooning belly, and contrast of openness and closure within the form.
Amongst the 2-D prints lining the walls, Angela Roberts “Underwater Bridgestone Aquatic Evening,” jumped out. A screen print reminiscent of the layered worlds some of Chagall’s playful figures live in, it is in bright pastels, with rich blue, and spicy hot pink, placed atop a craft paper brown backdrop. This paper choice alone caused the print to stand out from its peers, but the whimsy and delight of its subjects—a dress easily mistaken for a layered cake confection, a man in a horned headpiece standing atop Not A Chair, a stream of daisies abutting a hardwood floor—further distinguished it from the darling animals pals and etchy demons nearby.
Doing some heavy lifting in the functional category of goods, Cynthia Correia, former Department Chair in Carpentry at Laney, showed minis and wall-mounts, coffee tables and heirloom lamps.
“Hole in One” and detail of “Pushover”, Cynthia Correia
In the past few years Correia has expanded her toolkit to include paints, and her works often feature a beautiful blending of the timeless, smooth curves and simple, clean lines of mid-century inspired functional furniture objects paired with bright, surprising colors and geometry to bring further life—that of the maker, perchance—to the pieces. The solely raw wood elements and pieces especially breathed warm energy into their surroundings.
Utilizing precious and light-catching hardwoods like mahogany, Osage orange, curly maple, and bubinga, sometimes paired with far less pricy MDF coated in layers of blues and greens and browns for the final pieces, Correia first creates miniatures of everything—crafted with the same precision, with the identical materials (well, styrofoam mattress aside), with those on display making for delightful departure from the utility of her other work and adorable contrast to their human-sized coffee table home.
A dozen and a half other prints, luxury adult mobiles, and whimsical birdhouses (and fish house) round of the remainder of the show, nearly all those on sale priced affordably. The gallery space is chock full without feeling too stuffed, with proper attention and care paid to each individual artist and an eye for flow through the room. Peep while you can!
June Steingart Gallery is open to the public Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday, 11:00 - 5:00 pm; Thursday, 11:00 - 3:00 pm
