PRESS RELEASE

Twenty-five years ago, I took my first ceramics class. Fifteen years later, I became visiting professor of ceramics at RIT. Now, I’m finishing up my application for tenure. To mark this occasion, I’ve challenged myself to be in the mindset of a student preparing for a thesis exhibition rather than a professor closing in on a twenty five-year dream.

The Incomplete Collection is based upon the premise of assigning myself two exercises that I would typically prompt our students to do. By blending and layering them, I intended to place myself into the type of creative discomfort that I recall when I prepared for my own first show. 

The first exercise is a longstanding School for American Crafts ceramics tradition. Three words: “on the wall.” With these words, incoming graduates begin a semester-long expedition to create a body of work hypothetically engaging a wall. It’s such a simple idea, yet it often drives students mad. They underestimate it, and usually overcomplicate things, but they make it through, often with unpredictable and captivating results.  

 The second exercise is called “Revisionist Antiquities.” This juggernaut of an assignment merges academic, art-historic rigor with process-based experiential learning. Undergraduate students work from the book The Complete Collection of Antiquities from the Cabinet of Sir William Hamilton. They research a vessel from this book by studying it and by making it. Ultimately, through object making and writing, they are tasked with building a timeline across history, linking their own present creative moment to a deep ceramics history. 

There are five sites of new work that address these prompts in this show. They are surrounded by pivotal work from the last decade that I believe created the foundation from which this new work emerges.   – Peter Pincus

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Through porcelain vessels and more, Peter Pincus blends color theory, the history of decorative arts, and cutting-edge technical experimentation in ceramics. As an artist and designer, Pincus continues to garner national attention for his research-based practice that includes the Wedgwood collection at the Birmingham Museum of Art (AL) and most recently, an examination of several conceptual works by Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA). Pincus is currently Assistant Professor of ceramics at RIT's College of Art and Design. He is represented by Ferrin Contemporary (North Adams, MA).

 @peterpincusporcelain

(Photo credit: Elizabeth Lamark)