Dan Gunn on Zach Weber

Zach Weber’s expressive, exploratory ceramic works use the vessel form as a model to riff upon and to transform. Crude at times by design, the gestural vessels evoke a sense of urgency and necessity in their construction. Weber claims inspiration from Chicago’s architecture, and the pieces are frequently architectural, rising up from hand built foundations and performative in the way that they balance or occupy space. 

The Seedling series demonstrates Weber’s effulgent process. The thrown or coiled vessels are carved apart; the excised parts moved, reoriented, and recombined back into the work. The playful application of incised textures and glazed patterns, carved shapes, and voids pepper the pottery’s surface. Pieces are typically fired multiple times in sympathy with their iterative carving and assembly. The collaged forms and the many firings give the sculptures a feeling of the effulgent density of accrual; that the Seedling’s embody the very essence of possibility, of their own vibrant becoming. 

Elsewhere, in the Mirrors series, Weber explores the character of ceramics’ material and cultural associations. The Mirrors are wall-mounted, ceramic compositions with gilded glaze frames. These shaped reliefs create an analogy between the brushstrokes in expressionistic painting and the fingertips sweeping through clay. Elastic in their shapes, the rugged, gestural works resemble proto-paintings from deep history. With almost more in common with cave paintings than contemporary art, the Mirror series tests the limits of gestural expression to carry aesthetic meaning. 

Similarly, the Flowers in Repose series presents bowls of flowers that are in Weber’s words “too cared for''. Clunky coils of flower stems are flared out into poppy petals by hand. The bouquets rest in thrown celadon pots with cracked rims and filled with ‘soil’ made from throwing trimmings. The dense, drooping, flowers lay in failing containers. The arrangements become avatars for the artist’s (and by extension, ceramics’) ability to contain sincerity and to evoke pathos. These idealistic gifts to the viewer are static, perpetually wilting, failing to deliver the beauty of their sentiment, but given still. However, there is a sense of commitment in their number, that the necessity of attempting even an imperfect beauty is more important than never trying. And that pathos can be found within the materiality of clay itself.. As with the Seedling series, Weber pursues possibility, the act of becoming, to the end. 

Guided by curiosity, Weber’s practice intuitively pursues the limits of ceramic form in their construction, material, and associations. In this regard, he inherits the expansionist spirit of postwar ceramicists like Peter Voulkous or Paul Soldner that embrace ceramic innovation. Yet Weber pursues this goal within a thoroughly contemporary framework wherein ceramics is one of many possible media available to the artist, not a constraint. In every work, his expressive method of construction is clearly visible to the audience, creating a sympathetic feeling of the works as remnants of the artist’s hands but also still alive and in-process.