Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery
New York, New York
January 8 – February 5, 2009
Jeanne Quinn: “Everything Is Not As It Seems”

Anyone in search of art in Greenwich Village could do worse than come in out of the cold at the Greenwich House Pottery’s cozy Jane Hartsook Gallery, where the ceramic artist Jeanne Quinn has grabbed the concept of the chandelier and run with it, filling the intimate space ceiling to floor with a surreal white chandelier—actually a grouping of eight chandeliers—created out of porcelain, wire and electrical hardware. There are gracefully looping wire strands strung with varying sizes of round porcelain “beads” and elongated rounded fragments that resemble bone from which at intervals light bulbs project and emit a subdued glow—these are working chandeliers. The effect is light-hearted and weighty, sensual and thought-provoking. The whiteness of the porcelain and the glimmer of the lights stand out against the red walls. The introduction of some strands of glazed “beads” to contrast with the primarily matt elements contributes to the decorative atmosphere.

In her statement, Quinn, a distinguished artist who teaches in the department of art at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where her mentor Betty Woodman is professor emerita, invokes Richard Wagner’s lofty concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk —the complete work of art—to explain what she was after in this and previous installations. Also playing on the German word for decorative art, Kunsthandwerk, she says, “I like to think of my pieces as Gesamtkunsthandwerks, in which I attempt to combine multiples that reference traditionally decorative objects into sensually encompassing installations.” Quinn “reads” the Hartsook Gallery s a “parlor” space with wood floors, a marble fireplace and tall windows—a perfect room in which to explore her ideas about the decorative arts and “bridging the gap between public exhibition space and domestic space.”

An interesting aspect of this and her other installation works, Quinn pointed out to visitors, is that this large-scale piece is put together from small, even tiny, parts. Quinn made and fired the individual elements for the chandeliers in a studio she maintains in Brooklyn, New York, using an exceedingly small kiln. The bone-like pieces, roughly 15 inches long, barely fit, she said.

The visitor definitely becomes a participant in the environment of such a work, and for Quinn this is the essence of the decorative arts. Alluding to the “history of the space as a parlor and the decorative objects found there,” she reshaped these elements into a contemporary work that “references multiples, materiality and the body.”

Asked about the meaning of the title, Everything Is Not As It Seems, Quinn says she is referring to one’s first impression of the piece as chaotic, since it plays against the expectation of a chandelier having radial symmetry. As one further experiences the installation, however, one realizes that there is an underlying logic and symmetry after all. So, to invert Magritte’s famous title This Is Not A Pipe, one might call it This May Well Be a Chandelier.

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