Reviews
John Elder Gallery, New York, NY
When asked to describe the work of Bill Stewart a quote by Joseph Campbell sprung to mind. For Campbell, mythology is “the song of the universe, the music of the spheres, a song you keep dancing to even when you don’t know the words." This nameless tune animated the John Elder Gallery with the melody of intense colors proposed by thick pastels displayed on a series of impish critters.
Dream in’ Sweet Dreams
lulls the
viewer into another realm, while Wind Up
Willy,
the
self-proclaimed deity of human folly, celebrates earthly pleasures on the
ground. These
grimacing icons provide a playful canvas for Stewart to explore the folly of
progress. “I believe as an artist I must continue to gamble, abandoning the
security of explanation for the allure of the subconscious response to my
world. To do so, one must occasionally reach inside to the secret past or
plunge into the absurd. The more I work, the more fluent I become at this
wordless visual language.’ Stewart adds “The titles are just as intuitive as
the work.”
Triple Action. Mickey Johnson. an amorphous figure with large white ears, recalls Disney’s favorite mouse This blank reverie blindly steers the wagon wheel that rest on the tip of its phallic tail. The juxtaposition of the two symbolic entities, the plane and Easter Bunny, represent scientific progress, and religious commodification, establishing a parallel development on the timeline represented by the wheel. The composition and material question progress, and the humor marries primitivism with pop culture.
The Sky Dancers
swing from the
ceiling, while the Scarecrow wards off banality, and the raven, the
trickster, searches for the hug in Bill Stewart’s magical Garden of Eden.
This series of curious totems narrate the myths and rituals of the
cultural production of civilization.
Susan Barry, American Ceramics
The Clay Place, Pittsburgh, PA
When you enter a space
taken over by Bill Stewart’s pieces, you know you have left the world of the
simple. There is no trace of functionalism (except a wry mockery of it) in
his ceramic practice. Rather he presents strong sculptural forms and
arrangements that are
part
of a largely undisclosed story.
The arrangements made in the past three years are composed of figures and artifacts that call to mind tribal art and the surviving fragments of primitive agrarian cultures. They, as with archaeological objects divorced from their natural time and place, tell their stories in a veiled and distanced way.
So with Stewart. These pieces are shown as fragments of the artist’s cultural mindset and also as complete, if often tantalizing, works of art. A recent group of clumsy tools, primitively described as Lifter, Drill and Strainer. unavoidably anthropomorphic in form, makes a useful introduction to the more complex groups that occupy and absorb the mind.
The most interesting of
these large pieces are assemblies of cast and molded forms, often banal
shapes of birds, doll’s heads or teapots. In Trinity these elements are
arranged hieratically and confrontationally and, because they are glazed in
a black basalt-like slip, have acquired an unexpected monumentality. Some
pieces are lighter in content, even to the extent of whimsicality. The
texture of his surfaces is never boring.
But they remain Stewart’s
intellectual property, just as the stone faces on Easter Island remain the
intellectual property of their extinct makers. We know that Stewart is
interested in ecological issues (because he has said so). and we may look
for hints of that interest in his wont But in doing so we both encounter and
are deflected by issues that Stewart has not chosen to speak about in any
terms.
Ultimately it is the magic of the forms, their odd juxtaposition and their
robust glazes and color, that fixes Stewart’s work in the mind.
Graham Shearing, American Ceramics