The new installation in the Art Gallery, In Between, features (mostly) sculptures by Beth Lo and Kelly Connole. Kelly Connole, who is an assistant professor here, gave a talk Friday about the ideas and process behind her part of the installation, which consists predominantly of clay and metal sculptures of rabbits.
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There were all kinds of rabbits: rabbits staring at each other, rabbits surrounded by spiky balls, rabbits clustered in a huge group, rabbits staring at plum bobs suspended above their heads, and rabbits arranged in the pattern of the digits of a social security number.
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Why did Kelly Connole make these rabbits? Why did she make so many rabbits? And, perhaps equally intriguingly, HOW did she make all those rabbits? I am certainly not the person to answer any of those questions, but, fortunately, I don't have to try, since Kelly Connole herself answered some of them herself on Friday, at the exhibition's opening.
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As for the "why make rabbits" part, she said that she's always liked the word "rabbit," and how it sounds. Even before she started making rabbits, she would think about the word "rabbit" while she was sculpting, and eventually she decided that she should be sculpting rabbits. Not just the word, but the animal itself also has a sort of mysterious appeal, she said- rabbits are cute, but there is something a little off about them- you can see a rabbit from a distance and think about how adorable it is, but sometimes when you get closer the rabbit remains motionless, and there's something a little eerie about that.
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She told the audience about one night in her childhood that helped form her fascination with rabbits: she lived out in the country ("where everyone brought a hunting rifle to school because you never know when you'll need to go hunting on lunch break"), and one night she woke up, looked out her window, and saw a tremendous array of rabbits stretching out into the distance beneath her window. A flock of birds flew over, and their shadows passed over the rabbits on the ground, and she had a feeling that this was probably going to be one of the single most beautiful things she would see in her life. Years later, in the auditorium on Friday, she told her audience that she had been right about that.
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The exhibition piece above is Kelly Connole's attempt to recreate that moment in clay: a bunch of clay rabbits spread out over the ground, with textures and patterns imprinted on their backs instead of the shadows of birds. (Although it HAS been displayed with special stage lights meant to look like tree and bird shadows.)
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In addition to making clay rabbits, Kelly Connole also makes metal ones. Metal being a much tougher material to sculpt than clay, this required going to a foundry, creating wax molds for the metal to set into, and sending the mold through an industrial labyrinth of fans, furnaces and conveyor belts. She wanted to do all the steps herself, but the people at the foundry wouldn't let her put on a full-body thermal suit and lift the metal out of the furnace. They did, however, bring out "the good stainless steel" when they found out she was making a work of art- which she was a little concerned about, given that they had just been making airplane and reactor core parts with the other kind of steel. A lot of the people she met making machine parts in the foundry were poor, and some were immigrants without social security numbers, which led her to make a sequence of metal rabbit heads in the 3-2-4 pattern of a social security number.
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Kelly Connole said she feels a sort of duty to research rabbits – both the actual animal and their place in human art and culture – so that she knows what her work means and what sort of artistic traditions it continues. This means that she studies ancient pottery depicting rabbits, and she goes to county fair rabbit shows to see the competition rabbits up close. One time, a rabbit show official, mistaking her for a competitor, asked her what division her rabbit was in, and she responded that she was just a spectator. The official, very excited, said "Gather round, everybody! We have our first spectator!"
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That last one wasn't a rabbit. Kelly Connole also displayed teacups, ceramic crows, strange little metal devices containing furballs, and other assorted sculptures, alongside ceramic art by Beth Lo, some of whose work appears below.
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So, if you want to go see some ceramic bunny rabbits, there are a whole lot of them in the Art Gallery right now. And if you're wondering why they served bunny-shaped cookies in the LDC on Saturday – they were leftovers from the reception.
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