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2015 NCECA Emerging Artist - Andrew Casto
Earlham College provided the artist's undergraduate education from 1996-2000. Further studies included earning an MFA at the University of Iowa from 2007-2010 and attending The Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana from 2011-2012. The artist creates assemblages out of found materials like ceramic, luster, rubber and wood that seek purpose and beauty within natural conditions of disorder. Examples include Assemblage 32 from 2011 and Assemblages 61 & 52 from 2014 and 2013.
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2015 NCECA Emerging Artist - Andrew Casto
- 2. Earlham College, Richmond,Indiana,1996-2000. The School of Art and Art History, The University of Iowa 2007- 2010.
- 3. The Archie BrayFoundation, Helena, Montana, 2011-2012.
- 5. Rationality is whatwe do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process. Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices
- 6. Entropy (arrow oftime); detail, 2012. seeking purpose and beauty within natural conditions of disorder
- 7.
- 8. Assemblages 61 &52, dimensions various (approximately 20-24” height each), ceramic, luster, rubber, 2014 & 2013.
- 9. Various source material,Wikimedia Commons.
- 10.
- 12. Coral reef nursery,Key Largo, FL.
- 13. Assemblage 43, 20x28x32",ceramic, glaze, luster, multiple firings, 2012.
- 14. The University ofIowa Fine Arts Campus, June, 2008.
- 15. Hierarchical vs. OrganicDesign Strategies
- 16.
- 17. Flood cleanup, Universityof Iowa arts campus and surrounding area, 2008.
- 18. Work in progress,Kansas State University, 2015.
- 19. Assemblage 44, encasedceramic, casting slip, glaze, gold luster, multiple firings, 2011. Assemblage 44, 34x12x14", ceramic, glaze, luster, multiple firings. Assemblage 67: 18x9x12", ceramic, luster, rubber, multiple firings, 2014.
- 20. The Breeders: 20x46x50”,ceramic, glaze, luster, rubber, wood, hardware, 2013.
- 21. Assemblage 63: 8x7x10",ceramic, luster, multiple firings, 2014.
- 22. Getty Central Garden,designed by Robert Irwin.
- 23. Assemblage 64: 12x13x28",ceramic, luster, acrylic, wood, hardware, multiple firings, 2014.
- 24. Before and aftershots of Assemblage 33, 7x8x20”, ceramic, glaze, gold luster, rubber, multiple firings.
- 25. Appropriated elements, constructedby fellow Bray residents Ben Krupka and Kenyon Hanson.
- 26. Assemblage 43: 24x14x22",ceramic, wood, plexi-glass, epoxy, rubber, hardware, gold luster, 2012.
- 27. Expansionist View: 14x24x20",ceramic, MDF, hardware, gold luster, 2012.
- 28. Time Check &New Bohemia neighborhoods, Cedar Rapids, IA, April, 2013.
- 29. Flood relics/samples, CedarRapids, IA, April, 2013.
- 30. Flood relics/samples, preppingfor rubber molds and polystyrene foam casting.
- 31. Assemblage 51: 14x7x19”,ceramic, rubber, luster, 2013.
- 32. Detail, Assemblage 63,ceramic, luster, 2014.
- 33. Assemblage 70 (Detetiveslie too): found object, wood, plastic, rubber, hardware, 2014.
- 34. Assemblage 61, ceramic,rubber, luster, polyethylene, found object, 2014.
Editor's Notes
- #2 Hello Everyone! My work is a metaphorical and autobiographical search for beauty and purpose, within the natural conditions of disorder and happenstance that fill our lives. I believe how we navigate such things determines who we are, and I want my work to speak clearly that it’s ok to rest in the unpredictability and the messiness of this life. Somehow that unpredictability has led me here to this incredible honor, and I want to extend my gratitude to the selection committee, and to NCECA for choosing to recognize me as an Emerging Artist. Thanks is also due to my recommenders, Peter Held and Brad Schwiegger; two people I respect tremendously, and whose encouragement and belief in my work has come at just the right time on more than one occasion.
- #3 I grew up in Delaware, Ohio, and was incredibly fortunate to have parents that encouraged and supported me to follow my passions. They were patient enough to let those passions emerge on their own, and to not pressure me into a more reasonable career path than this one. They’re here today – and I can’t thank them enough for their love and support. They somehow convinced me to go to Earlham College, where I was fortunate to meet my first ceramics teacher; Mike Theideman, who believed in me when he had very little reason to do so, and who also encouraged me to make a life out of this. I then spent a year working at The Ohio State University as a post baccalaureate student in the Ceramics department, where amongst other fortunate events, I met my wife Heidi, who I simply have to thank here, not only for putting up with me, but for being my studio mate, best friend, and a steadfast supporter of my career for nearly thirteen years. She has made innumerable sacrifices on my behalf, and I would literally not be standing her without her help. I ultimately landed at The University of Iowa for graduate school, where I was intentional about building relationships with a variety of faculty, particularly the painting and art history departments, nearly as much as in clay. This ad-hoc inter-departmental approach immersed me in myriad new ways of thinking about art, and helped free me from what I think of as “ceramics-blinders”.
- #4 Following Iowa, I was invited to spend a year at the Archie Bray Foundation, as a long-term artist in residence, and as the 2011-2012 MJD Fellow. The Bray was a pivotal time in my artistic development, where I was surrounded by supremely talented peers who were fine human beings, and where I was able to hone my craft into the work I make today. The year I spent in Montana was as idyllic as any I’ve ever experienced, and I am eternally grateful to Steve Lee, Rachel Hicks, Chuck Aydlett, and everyone at the Bray for the experience I had there, and for the service they continue to provide to this community. If you haven’t been there, you really must go.
- #5 After two years teaching at a small liberal arts college in Iowa, I was hired as an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University, in Manhattan, Kansas. We currently house a multi-faceted ceramics program that includes several graduate students pursuing MFA degrees, a thriving post baccalaureate program, as well as many talented undergraduate majors and even a one year post-MFA artist in residence program. It’s a wonderful place to teach and make art, and I’m grateful to my colleagues Amy Santoferarro and Glen Brown, for giving me a job, and for being genuinely wonderful people to work with, even when I’m out of my mind with stress preparing for NCECA.
- #6 I’d like to start speaking about my work with this quote from one of my favorite thinkers, musician and producer Brian Eno. “Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.” It’s a little tough to grapple with, but to me it suggests that we desire to make things a certain way in our lives, and this process rarely goes as planned. Art can be practice in a sense, for the ramifications of such moments.
- #7 So within this spirit, everything I do seeks to find beauty and purpose within natural conditions of disorder.
- #8 On a personal, narrative level, this work seeks to reinterpret negative forces of stress and emotional weight as tools for refinement and purification.
- #9 When translated visually, the work attempts to reflect these interpersonal forces on a macrocosmic level through the language of geologic erosion.
- #10 I borrow design elements and strategies from rock, ice, coral, and other natural formations, and hope to draw formal parallels within this methodology.
- #11 The work is resolved in the application of gold luster, which creates a tangible link to the iconography of gold as a standard for purity throughout history, and suggests that these moments of near collapse can signify the great worth and opportunity they possess.
- #12 I use a process where thick casting slip encases handbuilt, slip cast, and non-clay elements that burn away in the firing process. It feels a bit like working with Greek Yoghurt.
- #13 Examples where similar processes happen in nature are of particular interest to me, like this coral nursery, where a reef is being created in and around repurposed concrete off the coast of Key Largo.
- #14 Here is a piece of mine that feels similar to me, where gas pump handles, cast from a mold of a found object and appropriated as design elements in my work, are still visible in the structure of my assemblage.
- #15 I began working this way when I was exposed to a disastrous regional flood in between my first and second year of graduate school. This experience altered the physical location of my graduate studies, and required the relocation of our entire arts campus, and in the process dramatically changed how I thought about my creative practice.
- #16 Prior to the flood, my work generally involved organizing separate elements (clay, paint, ink, etc.) into specific, recognizable wholes. I’m borrowing heavily from Eno here, but I’d like to suggest this as a “top down”, or Hierarchical design process, like an architect, or engineer, who designs a building, or an object, and is the “author” of that design. I’ll contrast that idea with my current “organic” design strategy in the following slides, which I think of as being a “bottom up” process.
- #17 When my studio and much of my work was destroyed, I was immediately confronted with the futility of human effort in the face of Mother Nature in a way that I’d never witnessed before, and it had a profound effect on me and on the work I made. It was clear that the ultimate player in the hierarchy I was living in was the river, and there was nothing anyone, including the Army Corps of Engineers, could do to change that.
- #18 I found great comfort and value in the post flood work we did in the studio, as well as in the community at large, and it became clear to me that what interested me most about human nature, in myself and others, is not our ability to design and create systems of order, but rather our capacity for recovery, and to create positivity and strength in situations of great need. I think it’s what we do after things fall apart, that makes us who we are.
- #19 This revelation led me to a drastic rethinking of object construction. Presently, I embrace a practice that prefers the reduction of recognizable form into nuculei of sorts, and then integrates these nuclei into disparate and dynamic assemblages, without preconceived notions of the results of the process (as much as I can help it). Often initially recognizable forms are recontextualized as design elements in this work.
- #20 This is instead a “bottom up”, or organic process, unlike architecture, and perhaps more like farming, where a cultivator collaborates with an existing system of soil, weather conditions, and time. In this model, the question of originality and authorship is intentionally skewed; the inclusion of existing objects (clay and otherwise) is encouraged, and assemblages are produced through the accumulation of material coated in a porcelain shell.
- #21 When done properly this work creates itself to a degree. It’s a wonderful way to interact with material in the studio, and it allows me to be as surprised as anyone with how pieces turn out.
- #22 As a result, it’s my hope that my work is somewhat of a collaborative effort between myself and forces within nature, like gravity and entropy, and the clay in my pieces.
- #23 This practice is also heavily influenced by the visual artist and thinker Robert Irwin, who designed the Central Garden at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, spending several years traveling the California coast gathering specimens for transport to the grounds of the museum, all the while maintaining a future desire for what the garden might come to be in the years ahead.
- #24 It’s a similar collaboration with ceramic materials and surroundings that I seek, where the clay is allowed to be what it already is, and I act as a facilitator, encouraging and courting results.
- #25 I also actively research other creative processes where generative practice and assemblage are the norm. As a child of the late eighties and early nineties, the early years of hip-hop music, where sampling and DJ culture thrived before copyright lawsuits, are of great interest to me.
- #26 When I was at the Bray, I began experiments in what I consider a visual form of “sampling” or appropriation in the DJ sense. I began using discarded remnants from others working around me in the studio. These are rejected green elements of work by Ben Krupka and Kenyon Hanson, two of my studio mates during my Bray residency.
- #27 Here is a shot where you can see one of Ben’s wheels in a prominent location in a piece of mine.
- #28 And some of Kenyon’s handles in another piece, which furthers the idea that the work emerges from a cultivation of available elements – in this case, from the slop buckets of those around me.
- #29 I’ve used this method of “object sampling” in other projects as well, particularly when I lived and taught in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 2013. The same flood that altered my graduate study at the University of Iowa had also crippled this town twenty miles north, and It didn’t take long to see that entire neighborhoods were just missing, with a few boarded up houses remaining amongst empty lots with ghost-like driveways and cul-de-sacs leading to vacant grass fields.
- #30 I began to walk these neighborhoods as I tried to get to know the town, and discovered remnants of lives relocated still live just below the surface in much of these areas. It doesn’t take long on a walk like this before you literally trip on a half buried horseshoe, or bump into a child’s tree swing, now swinging over an empty green lot.
- #31 I would gather these items, cast them in rubber and plaster, and make positives to include in my work.
- #32 Once molds were made, objects were returned to their original locations, so that they were in effect just borrowed for a short time, and then laid back to rest in their previous habitat.
- #33 My unpacking of the Brian Eno quote mentioned earlier was that we that we often desire to make things a certain way in our lives, and this process rarely goes as planned; and that art can be practice in a sense, for the ramifications of such moments.
- #34 As I stand up here, it may seem that my “plans” have worked out pretty well, and to a degree they really have. I feel very fortunate to be here today. But there have been many complications, heartbreaking failures, and unhappy surprises along the way.
- #35 I’m no better than anyone at seeing the good in bad situations, but I do believe that personal and artistic growth happen as we fumble through the struggles of life. Its my hope that this work speaks to the grit and grime of our trials and tribulations, and that with clay’s amazing ability to slump, crack, drip, and cling, there is a nod to positivity and perseverance, and to the beauty found in wading through the muck of life. I talk in my artist statement about how stress and emotional weight in our lives might instead serve as opportunities for refinement, “rather than functioning as tools of our undoing”. It’s a way of saying that what is often most real are our hardships, and that these things put us in touch with presence and who we are in a way not much else does. I want the work to be a formal depiction of this. It’s about gravity, and about collapse, and about being ok with both. It’s what happens when I give up trying to make perfect pretty things, and allow the realness of who I am to take center stage. It’s a rehearsal really, for who I want to be in real life. Thank you. (PUSH THE BUTTON)