Abel Contemporary Gallery Exhibits

media release: January 10 - February 23, 2025

We present Joanne Kirkland and Maggie Jaszczak – The Nature of Things, Celestial: Group Show, and in no.5: Glacial Bodies by Carolyn Spears

Shows Open Online - -Saturday, January 11 at 10 am CST.

Events:

Opening Reception -  Friday, January 10, 5 - 8pm

Artist Talk with Carolyn Spears – Saturday, February 8, 2PM

Joanne Kirkland and Maggie Jaszczak – The Nature of Things

Maggie Jaszczak is a potter and mixed media artist from Ontario, Canada who now resides in Minnesota. After completing her undergraduate studies at Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson, BC and Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary, AB she received her MFA in Ceramics from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 2013. Jaszczak’s functional and sculptural objects are made of earthenware and slip that draw on the quiet, minimal forms of basic function, such as basins, bread troughs, and baskets. Using slab, coil, and mold techniques she makes a simple form, which she smooths and scrapes to articulate handles, edges, corners and rims. Surfaces emphasize the subtleties of material, process and firing as the primary decorative elements – dragged grog, finger marks, the layering of slips and terra sigillata, and the rough whites and blacks that come from reduction firing.

Joanne Kirkland has worked in ceramics since 1980 making pots in a barn in northern Illinois after graduating from Eastern Illinois University. As of 1984, Madison, Wisconsin has been her home, where she lives and works as a studio potter. Travels and studies in the southwestern United States, Mexico, Japan, and most recently Germany, have been major influences in her work. She uses  a wax resist glazing technique where wax is painted on as a first layer of glaze in a design and then resists the next color. Most of her pots are made on the wheel with porcelain clay, sometimes altered by paddling, stretching or adding slabs.  She likes the dynamic surface decoration with figurative and abstract imagery inspired by the elements and environment of her daily life.  

Group Show : Celestial

This show will portray the beauty of the night sky and places beyond our earthly plane to contemplate the profound mysteries held by the sun, moon, planets, and stars. This show will include artists working in various media exploring the beauty of the cosmos and contemplating a deeper reflection of our place within it. 

Theresa Abel, Randall Berndt, Barry Roal Carlsen, Holly Cohn, Kelly Connole, Mary Fischer, Mary Hood, Richard Jones, William Lemke, John S. Miller, Dennis Nechvatal, Ann Orlowski, Adam Stoner, and Jonathan Wilde

In no. 5: Glacial Bodies by Carolyn Spears

This body of work examines the phenomenon of melt, pairing geologic time with the mortal time of a human body. Glacial Bodies is about bearing witness and feeling one’s way through the precarity and anxieties of climate change.

In September of 2023, Spears traveled across Iceland to experience glacial sites as part of her ongoing research into ice and climate change. The works in this show counterbalance the geography of Wisconsin’s past-glaciated landscape with Iceland’s active glaciation, a place critically vulnerable to global warming.

The video work, also titled Glacial Bodies, implements the emotional human body to understand issues which expand beyond the self to include the larger environment. In this work Spears attempts to map the experience of quiet glacial death onto her own body as a way of connecting more intimately with this phenomenon. This action becomes a means for excavating the metaphors contained within the ice: the dualities of time, the shifting states of matter, the artifacts of memory, the inevitability of loss.

This exhibition offers a space for contemplating the reverence we feel towards our environment, and the anxieties we may experience in bearing witness to its vulnerabilities.