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Ritual Burn
Judd Schiffman
- Porcelain, stoneware, glaze
- 2019
- 32" x 43" x 3"
"There is a lot of suffering in life and much of that comes from trying to negotiate an exterior identity with the truth of who you are. I reflect on this idea and a mask-burning ceremony with my friends in North Dakota about 20 years ago.
The zen teacher Joko Beck said, 'We have a fictional “I” that we try to love and protect. We spend most of our life playing this futile game. "What will happen? How will it go? Will I get something out of it?” I, I, I—it’s a mind game of illusion, and we are lost in it….Essentially, this extra structure covering our life has no reality. It has come to be there because of the misuse of our minds. It’s not a question of getting rid of it, since it has no reality; but it is a question of seeing its nature. And as we see its nature, instead of it being so thick and dark, the covering becomes more transparent: we see through it.'"
- Judd Schiffman
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Judd Schiffman
Born and based in Providence, RI
Meticulously sculpted and psychologically charged, Judd Schiffman’s ceramic wall works intermix life experiences, cultural references, and historical imagery to probe how narratives are shaped. Drawing with clay, Schiffman makes glazed porcelain and stoneware tableaus with lively figures, fauna, and flora—each of which are installed on the wall as respective parts of a whole composition. The artist culls these eclectic motifs from children’s stories, modern art history books, YouTube cartoons, medieval manuscripts, and other sources that he encounters as a husband, father, and professor. The installations address layered themes ranging from myth-making to humanity’s relationship with nature.
The forms remain moveable within the frame that encircles each scene. Schiffman invites rearrangement of these pieces, which shifts the stories that his works tell: “The framed narratives open up a common ground where the viewer can enter into dialogue as a participant among the characters, objects, and landscapes,” as the artist explains. Schiffman’s embrace of ceramics and collaboration bridges earlier art movements: the reclamation of craft in the 1960s and ‘70s by artists who rejected stereotypical notions of pottery and textiles as domestic, feminine, or lowbrow; and the emergence of relational aesthetics in the 1990s as a genre of social art that empowers the viewer to take part in the work. Indeed, Schiffman integrates approaches from across 20th-century art history while meditating on the contemporary human condition.