:artist profile julia haft-candell
In person in her Glassell Park studio, LA artist Julia
Haft-Candell is an affable guide, walking casually
among her variously scaled works-in-progress to
make a point. But outside the studio, she is casting
an increasingly large shadow these days as a ce-
ramic artist. A few days earlier, she attended the
opening of the 2016 Scripps College 72nd Ceramic
Annual, for which she installed a large, wall-
mounted work. Her stint at Scripps marked the tail
end of a three-year teaching fellowship on campus,
and the second year in a row that she’s been in-
volved with the influential Ceramic Annual; in 2015
she curated the exhibition. This winter she had
a show at Ochi Projects, an ambitious new LA gallery near Mid-City. Meanwhile,
a visitor to the Art LA Contemporary fair could see two more large works by her
on display. Luckily, that sort of multi-tasking seems to come naturally to the prolific
artist. “I’m always working on more than one thing at one time,” she says. “I like
to keep myself busy, so there’s always something to rotate around to do.”Assessing the off-kilter convocation in her studio of creations suggesting knots,
ropes, combs, stalagmites, and other less discernable forms, Haft-Candell admits
an attraction to “things that look a little strange, but in a good way.” Indeed, one
of her more identifiable traits is the works’ willful indeterminacy, its ability to stake
out indefinite, murky, or liminal areas between the abstract, the familiar and the
weird. Referring to one of the works in her studio, she explains: “That one, I don’t
know what it is, I call it Three-Legged Blob With Vase. I feel the work is stronger
when I balance it: something known with something not known,” she adds.Raised in Oakland, Haft-Candell got her start with ceramics as an undergraduate at
UC Davis, studying under Annabeth Rosen, whom she cites as an influence. For her
MFA, she joined the highly regarded ceramics program at CSU Long Beach, just as
Kristen Morgin was leaving and Tony Marsh took over, both of whom she also notes
appreciatively. Which perhaps goes to one of the many appealing dichotomies in her
work: as quirky and individualistic as her works tend to be, they are clearly rooted in
a profound appreciation of the medium and its more adventurous practitioners. She
still speaks admiringly of the pioneers who shaped the field in the mid-late 20th cen-
tury: Peter Voulkos, John Mason and Ken Price, drawing a distinction between
today’s more conceptual ceramic artists, who aren’t necessarily trained in the
medium, who just enjoy the clay for what it is, and those ceramic artists who really
have a desire to push the material forward: a need to push the limits of the medium.Clearly, it’s an impulse she identifies with. Her experiential approach to clay deliber-
ately allows for various flaws, imperfections and discoveries, then she invites those
elements to transform the whole, following an intuitive path. Of the 2015 Ceramic
Annual, she wrote, curating the show was “analogous to how I engage with my
own sculptural practice: I bring together parts, that when assembled, merge into
a complex whole... Sections may support, anchor, complement or contradict one
another, but all are necessary to complete the composition.”For her show at Ochi Projects, she presented two large works, both determinedly
twisty and linear in form. The first featured a gourd-like, swollen blue base suggesting
a cartoony raised shoulder with two arms, which rose on each side to a white, knot-
like element set on top. The other, also blue and white, lay sprawled across the floor,
with flat colors and a pattern recalling diagonally joined bricks, its shape resembling
a loosely knotted rope, or coiled snake, or pair of languid legs. While the vertical piece
was in two halves, this one was in parts, which meshed unevenly, like ill-fitting puzzle
pieces. Her Scripps piece, titled Pretzel, also features a bowlike, fragmentary knot;
mounted on the wall, it flaunted a grid-like pattern of black and white.To p :
“Three-Legged Blob with Vase,” 2016
with other works in progress at artist’s studio
Below:
“Forward Lunge Knot,” 2016, Ceramic, 45" x 27" x 13"
Photo: courtesy Ochi Projects
70 art ltd - March / April 2016