ATLA is pleased to welcome you to the inaugural exhibition of The Aesthetics of Everyday Objects: The Plate to take place on Saturday, February 1, from 2-5pm. A group presentation of contemporary and historic artists has been brought together to evoke impressions of the domestic, “the plate,” which serves as a canvas ripe for pictorial representation.  Flattened and reconstructed with nods to modern painting, hierarchies between ceramics and paintings are destabilized through symbolic and literal portrayals of the plate.  Modern still lifes, dinner parties, vibrant landscapes, face plates, and surrealist scenes from the subconscious mind are interwoven to further emphasize the immediate question that comes to mind: “A plate show?” 

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Yes, a plate show (!), with emphasis on the exclamation. Almost nothing simultaneously obliterates and magnifies the highlighted inherent biases than an object that is thought to represent so little and, in contrast, symbolize so much.  

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Ceremoniously held a year after ATLA’s much-celebrated The Cup exhibition and continuing upon the theme of everyday objects, The Aesthetics of Everyday Objects: The Plate highlights the works of 18 artists whose practices span Los Angeles, New York, Ohio, Japan, and Brazil.  In homage to the legacy of artists who share in this appreciation of the plate—including, for example, such artists as Judy Chicago, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Lucio Fontana, and Julian Schnabel— the plate is a welcome disruptor.  As the painter-turned-ceramicist Peter Voulkous most famously shared, after all, “Clay is just thick paint, and paint is nothing but thin clay.”  

-Jenny Hata Blumenfield