New Work

The opening show of the fall season at Frank Lloyd Gallery will be ceramic artist Tony Marsh. Marsh's ceramic vessel forms, filled with objects, have a distinctive white perforated body, allowing the interaction of light. Patterning is created by the diffusion of light on the small holes, filling the visual field. By this distinctive and meditative method, Marsh transforms a dense ceramic material into a shimmering, airy gathering.

Author and critic George Melrod has described this work as "...dramatic, made of stark, multi-lobed vessels and groups of objects that are coated with bone-white vitreous engobe and punctured to resemble a luminous, translucent scrim."

The exhibit will be composed of a dozen new works from this series. The forms that fill each vessel echo geometric structures found throughout nature, both at the microscopic and macroscopic levels. These shapes, familiar but mysterious in their re-contextualized state, deepen Marsh's exploration of the traditional vessel form. In a review of Marsh's 2007 exhibit, Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman noted that Marsh "…put to use his exquisite technical facility to multiple uses in still life groupings and single vessels."

Marsh, who was born in New York in 1954, has worked in Southern California for the past twenty years. This is his seventh one-person show in the Los Angeles area during that period. After receiving his B.F.A. from California State University Long Beach, he apprenticed in Japan for three years before returning to the United States to get his M.F.A from Alfred University in 1988. He is now the head of the ceramics department at California State University, Long Beach. Museum collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, in Sedalia, Missouri.