Surprise Ceramics in A Tisket A Tasket at Front/Space
A Tisket A Tasket at Front/Space image by Timothy Amundson
Kansas City is about to host National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) a
conference that works to engage a community for ceramic art, teaching, and learning.
NCECA is a convergence of the gatekeepers in the national ceramics community. These
exhibitions were priming the showcase of local and national artists working within the
confines of fine art ceramics, with some breaking those rules completely. As a medium,
ceramics has had a tough time with this distinction between fine art and craft. Some relegate
the medium entirely to an idea of elaborate plates, cups, or beautiful decorative objects but
nothing more. This of course is a myopic viewpoint that doesn’t usually allow for alternative
forms to be explored. A Tisket A Tasket is one exploration of how contemporary ceramics
can confront this conceptual void and pull us towards a larger conversation about the way we
interact with contemporary art as a whole.
A Tisket A Tasket at Front/Space image by Timothy Amundson
Front/Space is a very small two-hundred-square-foot storefront on the west end of the
Kansas City Crossroads Arts District. Bringing the street line in through its massive windows,
the audience was seen exploring from both sides of the glass. A Tisket A Tasket filled every
corner of the space with variably sized crudely taped rectangular cardboard boxes, these
nod to the traditional display of ceramic objects, on perfectly crafted white pedestals. The
work itself by artists Charity Thackston and Julia Six was a combination of both ceramic, and
found objects that created a sampling and repeat of what would be found in a teenage girl’s
bedroom. Ceramic alarm clocks grounded space on the pedestals also taken up by painted
books, altered found postcards, a peppering of ceramic White-Out bottles, mixtapes, and
miniature high school composition notebooks. In the moment of First Friday, I noticed there
were already gallery patrons touching the work on the pedestal, normally ceramic work may
serve as functional but never touched in a gallery. This exhibition only had four instructions
for the viewer; ‘look, listen, pay attention, and choose!’ written on the gallery walls.
A Tisket A Tasket at Front/Space image by Timothy Amundson
When I walked into the exhibition space Cindy Lauper’s Time After Time was echoing over a
bluetooth speaker set in the ceiling. I kept exploring the show, opening the notebooks
scattered about the floor and pedestals, picking up the multicolored ceramic mixtapes and
feeling a little bummed about how these non functional objects reference a media format now
starting to calcify in history. Inside of each notebooks were lyrics to cheesy pop love songs
ranging in span from the mid 80s to the early 2000’s. The mixtapes and laminated
“Blookbuster” video membership cards pushed a humorous failure of our desire to return to
the past forward. Exploring the space became like a trip to the old corner video store; pulling
titles that seem interesting and reading the backstory to see if it’s worth the watch.
A Tisket A Tasket at Front/Space image by Timothy Amundson
The importance of A Tisket A Tasket is the work’s slow read. The objects’ lingering irony
may raise the question “why ceramics” but it is this time consuming crafting which allows for
the artists’ riff on the status quo of the medium and its continual sobriety to occur. I took my
time with objects in the show, in humor thinking how important their function was to us not
long ago. It is this controlled slowness of observation with the work that put us back in touch
with the slower speed and moment in life we crave.The time in which White-Out was CTRL +
Z, alarm clocks were separate from phones, and our inner thoughts or desires were retained
on paper notebooks or postcards rather than Facebook timelines. These ceramic pieces by
Charity Thackston and Julia Six functioned as takeaways for the audience attending the
exhibition, a physical thing rather than a photograph. These found objects that melded with
the ceramic work were the guides for the viewer. A new narrative is created each time a
composition book is open or any time a book title is read. The importance of read and the
slowness of action in A Tisket A Tasket created a new playing field for ceramic objects to
exist within.