Remains of the Clay

Artist Amanda Smith isn’t ruling men out entirely. True, her “ceramic paintings” feature an army of characters formed exclusively of stoic little girls who look to be more worldly versions of Ms. Alice of Wonderland, but, as the San Jose State MFA explains, it’s a matter of mouthpiece suitability and not discrimination. “They’re easy communicators for me because I can associate so easily with that feminine world,” she says. “Plus, I like doing ornamental patterns on dresses.” Indeed, Smith’s elaborate process is built around opportunities for adding intricacies. Beginning with a clay slab, Smith carves and glazes it, adds lusters and 3-D components and finally details the work with oil paint—all interspersed with four rounds of firing. “There’s a stigma about ceramics in the art world; it’s this passé medium,” she says. “But I like it for that reason—the novelty and the history of it.”

Inspired by miniature paintings Smith first glimpsed on a trip to India, the pieces in her debut solo show this month at Union Square’s Jack Fischer Gallery present themselves as modern-day fairy tales often touching on issues of class. “It was this real awakening when I moved here—[this] kind of wealth does not exist where I’m from,” the Ohio native says. Hummer Procession reimagines a Turkish royal procession in modern capitalist terms, while Chainsaw reverses “Jack and the Beanstalk” with a prepster-cum-riot-grrrl sawing into a tree bearing a kingdom in its branches. “It’s a metaphor for the things that people destroy in the process of trying to attain wealth,” Smith explains. “As globalization keeps forging that great divide in social strata and economic hierarchies, I dwell on that and ponder it a lot. It finds its way into my work.”

Amanda Smith on view at Jack Fischer Gallery May 17–June 28