Turn Me Over

Molly Lecko Herro and Alim Ringgold

January 6 - 28, 2024

Turn Me Over is an exhibition of drawings and ceramic sculptures created by artists Molly LeckoHerro and Alim Ringgold. Through a selection of ceramic-framed illustrations, sculptural vessels, and ceramic burial objects, abstract narratives emerge surrounding death, its way of revealing the body as a vessel, and a subsequent curiosity about the immaterial substance contained within bodies both animate and inanimate. Thinking of holes, cavities, vessels, and containers as innate and fundamental to humanity, this combination of works explores the relationship between the held and the holder, when bodies are containers and containers are extensions of the body. Herro’s sequential image works contain glowing visions of stony burial caverns and dream-like scenes that capture a sense of permeability and vastness within the body, held gently by plasmatic and winding hand-made frames. 

Considering caves, burial sites, arts of the Stone Age, and how with time, these collaborations between human and geologic forms begin to share the role of recording earth histories, Ringgold constructs a shadowy grave site composed of ceramic skeletal remains and a collection of curious burial vessels. Drawing a relationship between the vessel of the body and ceramic vessels which have historically been used as burial objects to contain important non/materials necessary for transition into an afterlife, these vessels warp and bubble, their contents activated and preparing for etheric use. The already transformed vessel of the body now becomes shards of information to interpret.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Molly Lecko Herro is a sequential image artist. She was born in 1999 and immediately began drawing. She grew up next to a small river in central California and now lives next to a huge river in Portland, Oregon. Molly makes work about holes, cavities, vessels, and containers, which tends to also be about learning, preservation, rotting, imperfection, and complex relationships. The core of her artistic practice is drawing on paper, sometimes with graphite and sometimes with watercolor. Other practices orbit this core, including cold-finished ceramic, weaving with found fibers, glass casting, and woodworking. She loves finding ways to transform materials to the point that their true natures are obscured. She is inspired to create by artists like Geneviève Castrée, Dominique Goblet, Louise Erdrich, and Ursula K. LeGuin.

@meatmolls

Alim Ringgold (b. 1999) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Engaging primarily with ceramic sculpture and sound, they use these mediums as tools for developing a language of personal symbolism and spirituality informed by a desire to intermingle and dissolve the boundaries between our physical, spiritual, and emotional realities. Most recently performing and showing work under the moniker Neolith, Alim utilizes noise, performance, and sculptural installation to bring forth a disruptive wisdom embedded in the metaphors of stone and the earth's many magical and transformative geologic processes.

@ne0lithh