Works of 4 San Diegans at Southwestern College Exhibit the Appeal, Challenge of the Crafts

The difference between craft and art has something to do with the ease with which we talk about artists as suffering or tortured souls. The same doesn’t ring at all true of those of in the crafts. Craft is more about pleasure than that, both in the making of its objects and in their appreciation.

Like art, craft prizes invention and skill, but it prefers an association with function and the practical world to the more ephemeral preoccupations with ideas characteristic of the art world. With this orientation, it’s no wonder that the domain of craft attracts so many people. Just think of the Faberge eggs.

A four-person exhibition at Southwestern College in Chula Vista crisply demonstrates craft’s appeal, as well as some of its challenges. The show, titled “Four Traditions,” offers furniture by Ron Smith, jewelry by Leslie Leupp, weavings by Consuelo Underwood and ceramics by Jamie Walker. So we not only see four types of products of craft, we also see four strongly craft-associated media: wood, metal, fibers, and clay, respectively.

Ron Smith’s furniture constitutes a set of beautifully made, lusciously finished send-ups of such “stylish” styles as post-modern, Southwestern and Frank Lloyd Wright/Prairie School.

A large jewelry box looks like a model for an office tower a la Michael Graves, the post-modern neo-classical architect whose “Aventine” project is under construction in San Diego’s Golden Triangle. Smith’s combination of table and chairs plays on Southwestern stylistic features in a way that is witty and slightly biting, especially since one of the chairs appears to be sprouting teeth, while the other carries on its back what looks like a bunch of spent bullet casings.

Among the show’s 15 works by Smith, his approach is perhaps best summarized in a work he titles “Chicken Cabinet,” an elegant deco-style cabinet supported by hipped legs encrusted with feathers. This is beautiful, lively design executed with superb skill and very much at the cutting edge of invention in its domain. It succeeds without ever begging a relationship to art.

Very different in material, scale and function, Leslie Leupp’s jewelry likewise explores the far reaches of design possibilities, but within a stylistic range that is more strictly “modern” in the sense that this refers to a predominance of geometric forms. Yet, there’s an edge to this work, too, evidenced by the repeated use of saw-blade shapes.

Evident, too, is a strong desire on Leupp’s part to create bases and stands for his brooches, earrings, and pins. The result is that the work begins to look very attractive as small-scale sculpture. From this, it becomes possible to consider that the jewelry looks more attractive on its stands than if worn as intended, that is as part of an ear of unpredictable shape or a jacket of equally unpredictable color, texture and cut.

When jewelry edges toward being sculpture, craft edges into art. Leupp’s work doesn’t push this line. It more or less toys with it.

Consuelo Underwood’s weavings, however, because of certain elements within some of them, get tripped up here. Her handling of non-traditional plastic fibers and metallic threads, and her preference for softened Day-Glo color, succeed in evoking a kind of attractiveness in these materials that isn’t usually associated with them.

The pair of long, narrow weavings produced in this way and hung in the middle of the gallery have a cloud-like quality that is enhanced by these materials. But, in several other works, when Underwood paints on sheets of plastic before cutting them into strips and reassembling them into the fabric of a weaving, the unconfident nature of the imagery as painting proves distracting.

In Jamie Walker’s ceramics, however, craft’s flirtation with art pays off. Aiding in this outcome is the status of clay as a sculptural material used to produce sculpture as well as a wide range of objects for everyday use.

In addition, most of Walker’s works look wheel-thrown, and everybody assumes that a potter is a craftsman. But Walker doesn’t produce pots, he produces planets--Neptune, Mercury, and Uranus in particular. The work titled “Mercury,” for example, measures about 5 feet high and consists of a large ceramic beach ball on top of which sits a smaller, pockmarked, greenish orb which has on top of it a huge mouth that’s covered with warts on the outside and deep blue on the inside. Uranus is likewise imaginatively represented, wearing a conical hat that sits atop a bloodshot eye which peers out from the middle sphere.

This preoccupation with near-earth astronomical subjects also appears in a group of ceramic platters and in a roughly closet-size installation that presents a view of the solar system seen from perhaps a moon orbit distance and looking away from the sun toward the outer planets, which are represented as partial spheres. There’s something of a tentative quality to this large work in which the planets are more realistically represented than they are in the free-standing forms like the Mars and Uranus. But there’s an overall suggestion here of intriguing directions evolving in Walker’s work that arouses curiosity about what might follow.

By and large, then, this is a very attractive exhibition. Its objects make you admire them and want them, which is a very pleasant sensation.

The is on view through April 21. For gallery hours and information about events being presented in conjunction with the show, call the Southwestern College Art Gallery at 421-6700, Ext. 368.