Over the course of a year, artist Nancy Gruskin selected works by 11 others with studio visits as far afield as New York City and London, United Kingdom for “Object Lessons,” an exhibition on view through August 10 at the Concord Center for the Visual Arts. In her beautifully designed and written catalog, Gruskin wonders, “why are vessels in particular the objects of affection for so many artists?”
In the much-admired minimalist paintings of Giorgio Morandi, vessels are faithful servants, stoic and still in eternal yoga poses. The 2017 “Matisse in the Studio” exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, included vases and a gifted chocolate pot which he stated like actors play roles and had anthropomorphic use in his compositions.
In the works created by Gruskin and her selected artists, vessels do more than stand still. They defy assumptions about form or function, are ghosted by their outline, look like they will vanish or have recently formed, refuse to be useful, take on a monumental size, defy gravity or multiply out of control. In a benign version of the horcrux imagined by J. K. Rowling in her Harry Potter series, the vessels in each of these artists works enclose a portion of a soul and are safe keepers of the artists’ stories.
Gruskin earned a B.A. in studio art at Connecticut College, a PHD in Art History at Boston University and a J.D at New England School of Law. When I asked her about being both a lawyer and a teaching and practicing artist, she found the link, saying that the core of being a public defender for criminal appeals required a lot of creativity.