The State of Craft
through January 21, 2024
108 | Contemporary
Threads, grain, skeins, ripples: these are the textures that connect us, and no art modality lets us see them better than the one known as “fine craft.” There’s nature, and there’s us; between the two is the human hand, pulling the world’s constitutive elements into a dance with conscious feeling, one stitch or hammer strike or firing at a time.
I swoon a little pretty much every time I go into 108|Contemporary, whose wide windows and high ceilings house work that’s the result of an almost monastic kind of labor with materials like metal, paper, glass, and fabric. Walking through the gallery’s current show—The State of Craft, which features 33 pieces by its member artists, all from Oklahoma, juried by Mary Anne Jordan—is like taking a master class in the genre.
The expert curation of The State of Craft allows every subtle link between effort and environment—all those ripples and threads—to surface and speak. I feel like we don’t talk enough about the art of laying out a show, choosing what goes next to what, the thought that goes into designing the “container” of an exhibit so that its contents come into conversation with each other (and so that the viewer can hear that conversation clearly). In this case, how the show is arranged is as much a work of art as any of the pieces that are part of it.
As I walked through 108’s doors and turned to face the gallery space, I sensed a quiet presence at my left elbow. It was, in fact, another elbow—that of one of the ceramic figures in Clayton Keyes’ extraordinary Conflict Resolution, raised and inverted in an uncomfortable gesture of tension that felt as vulnerable as a held breath.