DUPLICATING DANIEL
Kari Marboe
February 20 – March 9, 2018
About the Exhibition
The Mills College Art Museum has the largest permanent art collection of any liberal arts college on the West Coast, and one of their sculptures is listed as ‘missing’. The museum is unsure if it was lost, stolen, broken, or otherwise. The only trace of this sculpture is its accession date (1975, gift of the artist) and a black and white photograph. The missing work was made by Daniel Rhodes, an artist who taught ceramics at Alfred University for 25 years and published six books on technical ceramics, including the widely relied upon Clay and Glazes for the Potter. Considering his contributions to the field of ceramics, Marboe thought it only seemed right to try to return the sculpture to the collection.
For Duplicating Daniel, Marboe makes a multitude of attempts to recreate the original Daniel Rhodes work based upon material research, data, and stories collected from interviews with artists in the field. As a result of her attempts, Marboe has amassed a growing collection of ‘replicas’ of Daniel Rhodes’ sculpture that manifest as hand built objects, digitally printed models, watercolor samples of the sculpture’s potential color, written descriptions from colleagues, and other renditions. Due to the embedded failures of approximation, interpretation, and the hand of a maker, we cannot be sure which of these new sculptures is the truest copy of Daniel’s work.
Marboe has since continued to duplicate the original sculpture and ultimately, the Director and staff of the Mills College Art Museum agreed that one of these versions is a close enough duplicate to be placed back into the permanent collection. Eventually, the story of the duplicate will unravel, deteriorate, be lost and misremembered to the point where everyone will believe the newly collected duplicate to be the original object seen in the black and white photograph. When this missing link is replaced, Duplicating Daniel will be complete.
This project is supported by the Mills College Art Museum and the Department of Museum Records & Research, which has collaborated with Marboe and provided access to archival information about this particular Daniel Rhodes sculpture. A detailed record of Marboe’s process and contribution to the collection will be preserved in the Museum Records & Research archives and object files.
About the Artist
Kari Marboe is a Bay Area artist and Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley and a BFA from California College of the Arts. Marboe’s research-based, ceramic works have been presented at The Mills College Art Museum, 500 Capp Street/Southern Exposure, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA; The Museum of Craft and Design, CA; Wave Pool Gallery, OH; The Museum of Northern California Art, CA; Jacksonville University, FL; and the Waffle Shop Billboard, PA.