Residue
with Nicole Seisler / January 2022
About the Studio Session
Residue, remnants, remainders, byproducts, castoffs, cut-offs, discards, edits, fragments: these aspects and fractions accumulate—sometimes purposefully, sometimes inadvertently—through our processes of making artwork. Are they inherently less valuable or worthy than the objects that occupy the central focus of our making? Or do these crumbs, loops, lumps, piles and shards contribute additional meaning that bolsters the prioritized work? Do they complete the prioritized work? Can the residue become the prioritized work? This Studio Session focuses upon creating platforms/stages/homes/containers and approaches/tools/methods/systems for holding, elevating, and speaking to the displaced materials and objects of our practices—and perhaps also the displaced parts of ourselves.
About the Lead Artist
Nicole Seisler is a Los Angeles-based ceramic artist who creates sculpture, installation, and public art that investigate time, materiality, process, and the overlapping roles of artist/viewer/participant/collaborator. Nicole has exhibited widely at museums ranging from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts Tallahassee to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. Her book Recipes for Conceptual Clay (in the time of covid-19) was published in 2020.
Nicole received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has taught ceramics at SAIC, the University of Washington, UCLA, and she was the Lincoln Visiting Professor of Ceramics at Scripps College. Nicole is also Director of A-B Projects, where she has curated over thirty exhibitions and offers programming that rigorously reevaluates the trajectory of contemporary ceramics.