>>PREVIEW
CHEH-AE SIAH
Linda Sormin
Runs until April 22
(Stride Gallery)
If art is a conversation between the creator and the viewer, then Linda Sormin’s current exhibit, Cheh-ae Siah, can only be described as multilingual.
Her three (mostly) ceramic sculptures create a threatening, intimate space within the gallery – shouting and whispering a chorus of forms, colours, ideas and narratives. Sormin describes her sculptures as having "an appetite," a particularly appropriate description for their seemingly haphazard inclusion of any number of contrasting ideas, materials and processes.
Sormin, currently an instructor at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, creates her work using an assortment of ceramic materials ranging from porcelain to earthenware. She combines examples of every possible technique: from hand-formed shapes to wheel-thrown vessels, from broken chunks of glazed pots to delicate unfired coils. Found objects are dispersed throughout the forms, buried within or jutting out from the top, like punctuation marks or punchlines. Meticulously pinched grids colonize parts of the sculptures, concealing the potentially precarious structural supports of certain sections.
Sormin also collects and invites contributions of broken or discarded ceramic pieces to be included in her pieces. Each gesture, object and technique inherently carries its own references and language. Crammed, shoved and woven together, the effect of viewing these unions is akin to being in a room full of simultaneous conversations, each on an entirely different topic. Initially overwhelming, these noisy combinations provide endless points of entry. The viewer is free to pick up a thread and follow it in: a choose-your-own adventure into the conversational ceramic landscape.
The title of the installation at Stride, Cheh-ae Siah, is a conglomeration of languages (Karen and Thai) that has no direct translation, but could read roughly as either "to lose oneself in mirth" or "to lose the ability to experience mirth." Sormin was born in Thailand, speaking and hearing a mixture of Asian languages, before her family moved to Ontario when she was five. She admits to a fascination with language and words, suggesting that her playful and flexible approach to language is somewhat like the way she collects and rearranges the shards of clay and objects into her pieces.
Sormin’s pieces are primarily created on-site, and for the Stride show, she invited a team of ACAD students and volunteers to help with the building. Like the many other aspects of this work that subvert traditional modes of ceramic production, the inclusion of several makers undermines typical ideas about artistic authorship. Rather than the distinctive esthetic voice of a single artist’s process, these works include the touch, ideas, pots and sculptures of more than a dozen contributors.
The end product is still very much akin to her past work, but Sormin points out that it wouldn’t have been the same without the help and input of the volunteers. She also mentions how "the forced idea of unity" is not something that she finds sustainable. By cultivating conflicts and points of tension, she continuously introduces new challenges into her work and process, keeping her and the sculptures consistently "ungrounded."
The resulting work includes endless subtle, awkward and eloquent variations of concepts, forms and techniques. It is these uneasy combinations and their overwhelming sense of precariousness that provide the tension and absurdity that make these works so engaging. |
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