David Katz has had a couple of chairs in his possession for as long as he can remember. They’re family heirlooms, but after 20 years of constant shuffling between his various residences, they had become worn to the point of disrepair. Still, Katz was not ready to part with them. So he decided he would use them as centerpieces of his art, creating installations that use the chairs and unfired clay to make a statement about the fragility of life.

Katz, a faculty member in the ceramics department at the Rhode Island School of Design, has a new exhibit called Flextime showing at 3S Artspace in New Hampshire and it borrows similar themes. Chairs, Katz says, are particularly unique objects in that their physical form implies the body but shown by themselves they also amplify the absence of the human form. By using old chairs—many of which have been rescued from salvage bins—and clay in its purest form in breathtaking installations, Katz presents the exhibit as a marker of time and change.

Unfired clay is an especially good medium to work with as it starts out wet and slowly cracks over time, Katz says. “I think of it as this living stuff and you can get an immediate, tactile reaction in a very visceral way,” he says. “You give the installation life and then you watch it go through this transition where it starts to get covered with cracks. Every crack is a marker of the passage of time, and that’s built into the art.” The fact that the installations are temporary—from a period of days to months—adds to that temporal feeling.

Liminality of Innocence and Loss. Photo by David Katz.

Katz maintains a studio practice in Providence while teaching full-time. As an instructor he believes it’s important to communicate honestly about the work you’re invested in. “I’m really focused on trying to open up pathways for students to find a voice that’s honest and uniquely them,” he says.

Katz shares his love of the medium of clay with his students reminding them about the incredibly rich history behind the material. “I want them to understand the context of its cultural narrative along with art history and contemporary use, to really know the rules, so they can then break them.”

Interstitial Tension. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

Katz applies the same principles to his own art as he explores the juxtapositions in life through found objects and ceramic principles. When he bounds found objects like chairs with clay, he’s swallowing them up and the chairs are simultaneously breaking free, he says. “It appears that this object has agency in that it is being wrapped and consumed but then it’s also cracking and falling apart.”

Every Which Way (scaled). Photo courtesy of David Katz.

In one sense, Flextime might well be a statement about the histories of families, Katz says. After all, they are bound together by blood ties even as each individual tries to carve his or her own unique identity. “I love these in-between places where there’s that constant push and pull, that constant tension.”

David Katz–sculptor
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image: Flextime installation. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

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If he’d been a better baseball player, Junichi Fukuda might never have discovered dance.
Fukuda, whose fluid, athletic style characterizes his interpretative performances, is a dancer, choreographer, and founder of Fukudance, a contemporary dance company based in Boston, Massachusetts. He’s performed nationally and internationally with prestigious choreographers like Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, and Jacqulyn Buglisi, and danced with companies from Boston to San Francisco. Currently, he’s interested in bringing more contemporary dance performance to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. To that end, this summer Fukuda is featured in the “Second Eye” series at 3S Artspace, which invites visitors to experience Fukuda’s interpretation—through dance—of the gallery’s current art exhibit.

As a teen, Fukuda played competitive baseball in his native Japan. “I was the third-best player on the team. I didn’t think I had a chance, so I quit,” Fukuda says. Instead, he became intrigued with breakdancing, which was sweeping 1990s Japan. “My friends and I started mimicking the videos and commercials we saw,” he says. “Then we started looking for outdoor spaces to dance in.”

Junichi Fukuda, photo by Nikki Carrara

His curiosity about the genre ultimately led him to the U.S. After graduating from the Boston Conservatory, he played with a variety of dance styles, from classical ballet and Baroque to contemporary. As a member of Ballet Tech/NY, Fukuda worked with famed choreographer Eliot Feld, whose distinctive style melding ballet and contemporary dance later influenced his own performances. “His style is ballet-based, but in his own way,” says Fukuda. “He taught me how to get deeper into my performance. He was always looking for something new.”

Fukuda moved to Portsmouth with his wife and son several years ago. He keeps a full schedule. This summer, he was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, pursuing a master’s degree in choreography with Jacksonville University.

His performances at 3S Artspace, which continue through September, take interpretive dance to another level. He uses art work to inspire a short dance and then welcomes the audience to share their feelings about what they watched. Then Fukuda reviews the comments and dances again. “It enables the audience to witness process and how perception and context influence a dancer’s expression,” he says. “I’m trying to get audiences familiarized with contemporary dance.”

Ultimately, Fukuda hopes to cultivate that audience. “I’m interested in exploring movement in new ways,” he muses. “I’m trying to craft dances as an outsider looking in.” Time will tell if Fukuda’s hit a home run.

Junichi Fukuda–dancer/choreographer
Portsmouth, New Hampshire/Boston, Massachusetts
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Top image by Nikki Carrara

The post From Baseball to Pliés appeared first on Take Magazine.

About ten years ago, after finding his niche in the woodworking world, Oedel focused on a certain organization up in New Hampshire. Oedel fit right in at The New Hampshire Furniture Masters Association, a group of exceedingly skilled craftspeople in the New England area. He started there as a member then became the chairman of the association for a few years starting in 2012. When asked about Furniture Masters, his pride and respect for the people involved is evident in his voice, “The [Furniture Masters] who do the work are really stellar artists”, he told me right off the bat. “Once a year we get together and we all bring pieces with us and we all sit there and say ‘I hope my piece is good enough. I hope it stands up to everyone else’s.’ It really keeps us all on our toes.”

Furniture Masters puts on an annual gala and auction to bring together fellow craftspeople, interact with the community and clients, and showcase the tremendous work being done in the field. “There are so many ways to think about design, to think about furniture,” said Oedel “…the group is so good because we get together, we talk about it, and our discussions inform everyone’s work. In doing that, we all get better.” It’s clear how the creation of a community like Furniture Masters has enabled craftspeople from across New England to network and support each other, and in doing so, raise the level of skill and excellence being produced all around us.

Table by Richard Oedel | Macassar ebony, corner detail | Image courtesy of Richard Oedel

Indeed, this time Portsmouth NH shared in the success of the affair. Oedel pointed out that the event has moved around, from Concord and other parts of New Hampshire, but Portsmouth and its people in nature are particularly “friendly to the arts”. Held for the first time this year in the stunning 3S Artspace, Oedel explained how “it was an interesting space visually, our pieces fit in there well, and it brought people in to see what kinds of things were happening there”.

With the triumph of their 2016 gala back in September, Oedel looks toward the bright future of his craft. With Furniture Masters receiving positive attention and praise each year from the Portsmouth community, and with the new interest in handmade furniture coming from young people, he is excited to be doing work like this in this moment. The trend towards authenticity and handmade quality, over the cookie-cutter, IKEA-styles of recent years, has Oedel and fellow makers looking forward to brand new collaborations, and younger clients than ever, “It’s all happening on a younger level now,” Oedel described, “there was a time when we were all sitting there saying ‘does anybody under 50 appreciate anything that we’re doing?’”

The answer to that, as seen by the Furniture Masters and the outpouring of interest from the Portsmouth community, is an enthusiastic, yes.

Top image Fort Point Cabinetmakers, Richard Oedel center | Courtesy Richard Oedel

The post A Master of His Craft: Richard Oedel and the Joy of Design appeared first on Take Magazine.