“Illumination,” Shalya Marsh’s exhibition in the Doshi Gallery of the Susquehanna Art Museum, is the farewell show in the Kunkel building on Market Street in Harrisburg, the current location of the Museum. The Doshi Gallery for Contemporary Art, which was founded in 1972 by Maya Schock, provides an exhibition place for established and emerging Pennsylvania artists to showcase their work and develop their art by engaging and educating the general public. The gloomy, rainy evening of the show’s opening brought a small crowd into the Museum to learn about the meaning behind the neatly arranged ceramic pieces by the artist.
Shalya Marsh graduated in 1998 with the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She currently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and actively participates in the art education of youth and adults in the area. Her commitment to help emerging artists created “Windows,” a project that utilizes empty shop windows in Lancaster city to showcase works of art. Her ceramic pieces are exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the country and praised with positive reviews from several publications.
“Illumination, “ which features beautifully solid pieces of highly patterned clay-work, is about communication and the limitation of human languages. Marsh tries to point out the inevitable losses that occur while sending and receiving words, sentences and full messages to one another. She taps into ancient writing and counting systems like cuneiform and connects them with modern communication practices like the binary code of computers. By connecting past and future Marsh creates intelligent and aesthetically pleasing ceramics.
The square-shaped tiles and their rectangular arrangements provide the framework to a tidy feel, even to the round and elongated protruding pieces of the show. The lively organic textures and patterns of the works draw the visitors to recognizable surfaces of corals, bubbling lava, cheese, bee hives, craters, cinnamon sticks, grass and other objects and living things we encounter in our everyday lives. The forms take us to the world of ancient civilizations of the Sumerians, Mesopotamians, the Mayas or the Egyptians. The dominant terracotta colors and the familiar but somewhat mysterious forms help the viewers connect with the works immediately. Earth colors of cream and smoky black work harmoniously to differentiate the individual pieces within one composition but at the same time pull the entire show together.
Marsh uses red earthenware clay, earth pigments and slips to create her intriguing pieces and arranges them into lines of decodable texts. She provides ciphers for the visitors and actively engages them to find the concealed texts within her work. Some pieces have more than one code designed into them, hiding the multiple layers of the artist’s messages. Some of the letters repeat themselves in the form of relief, print and negative space; others form interesting 3-dimensional sculptures with Morse code incorporated into their design. The different forms and shapes complement one another and create a coherent body of artwork precisely set in the gallery.
“Illumination” is a worthwhile visit to the Susquehanna Art Museum. In the Doshi Gallery the old medium of ceramic work is brought to a refreshing composition of pleasing sculptures and wall plates with a twist of decipherable text. Shalya Marsh shared some of the text during her gallery talk, I decoded some myself, now it’s your turn to come and see what you can read. Can you break the code?
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