Cindy Kolodziejski at Frank Lloyd - Brief Article

Ceramic artist Cindy Kolodziejski paints meticulous displays on her glazed earthenware vases, teapots and terreens Often using the handles of these old-fashioned domestic utensils as dividers, she presents paired images with surprising narrative contrasts. upon one side of Champagne Bucket (1999) for example, Kolodziejski depicts from above a man climbing a ladder, as if scaling the flut utensil On the other side, a blowsy woman in peasant garb leans back upon a swing, revealing a filled view up her petticoats. upon a kind of "champagne high," these sum of two units figures suggest a comic sexual roundelay.

Kolodziejski's utensils toy with the exaggerated details of Belle Epoque decoration. Garish handles, knobs and bases cast from Victorian lamps and furniture decorate her works, parodying the stultifying ornateness that marked the era. In the cavity of a fancy gravy boat, Kolodziejski paints perhaps the naughtiest image in 19th-century painting, Courbet's Origin of the World. Aptly enough, this crotch-shot depiction of a female unclothed is meant to be suffocate in watered in butter-enriched fatty sauce.

Kolodziejski go afters the exaggerated formal and thematic flourishes of her Victoriana with a vengeance, tapping into its psychosexual core. Pearl Necklace (1999) a slim pitcher with an extremely pinched waist, features upon one side the depiction of a well-fed woman's torso draped with a drawn out set of pearls; on the other side is the image of a lengthy cucumber being peeled to conform to a narrow hourglass shape. With its showgirl proportions, the seemingly corseted, hyperfemale shape of the utensil complements in a perversely satisfying way the suggestively phallic spectacle of cucumber-peeling. The pearl-clutching woman appears to have found an vent for her frustrations.

To and Fro (1998) not aways a gentler but similarly pointed vignette. upon one side of a pear-shaped teapot with a high pedestal base is painted the image of a similarly pear-shaped older man in a swing who compeers down from the apex of his trajectory. upon the other side is the same suited figure, seemingly at the opposite extreme point of his arc. The low-angle point of view perches the teapot man high above us, like a kind of happy CEO swinging along obliviously.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group