MOSAIKO

About the Exhibition

Visiting Athens last fall, I stumbled into the landscape architecture of Dimitris Pikionis. The grounds on the hill across from the Acropolis contain a series of pieces by Pikionis: pathways, courtyards mosaics, marbled foyers, sidewalks, and small structures.

His works are taken in over time, as one walks around, on and inside them. The works at this site range from figurative gestures with large amounts of visible mortar, to geometric abstraction where the stones and slabs are cut so perfectly and the joints are so thin that the mortar is almost invisible. In this work I recognized a direction in sculpture that I wanted to pursue which was not only that of mosaic, but also using mortar as a material to sculpt and paint.

From the space of Pikionis’s mosaic, I remembered Viola Frey and her huge ceramic figures put together like massive beads or forms on a totem. I remembered her spread out and sprawling figures made of many pieces coming together to form a female figure. I remembered Niki De Saint Phalle and her massive mosaic sculptures, with tiles cut and broken and colored mortar -all put together to form a figure, part girl, part dancing dog, part spirit.

I want to thank two new residencies, recently started by artists, for hosting me this year and giving me the space to think broadly about ceramics. First thank you to the Desert House Residency in Yucca Valley for supporting my work making adobe bricks. Not very many residencies can boast the combo of local (next door) horse manure and local clay. And I want to thank The Wool Factory A I R in Barcelona for giving me not just studio time, but also inner-city support in Barcelona, very close to Gaudi’s mosaics. This came on the heels of seeing the stone and tile mosaic work of Dimitris Pikionis in Athens which allowed the mosaic works of these two cities to wash around together in my mind.

About the Artist

Catherine Fairbanks' work questions empathy, its qualities and its limits as a contemporary construct. Her sculptural work manifests as performance, sound and ceramics, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and has attended national and international residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the National Textile Institute in Iceland, where in 2014 she produced her solo exhibition Empathomimesis, and most recently the Wool Factory AIR in Barcelona. She maintains a dual pursuit as a critical care nurse in an urban medical center and has been a visiting lecturer at Otis College of Art about The Aesthetics of Empathy, and at the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center where she presented a talk titled Art and Empathy. Fairbanks’s solo exhibition, Two Chimneys, was a critic’s pick in ArtForum in 2016. She is represented by Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles.