November 6, 2009

November 6th through December 5th
Open House Saturday November 7th 12-5
Reception for the Artist November 20th 6-8

Walter McConnell
"China Photographs: Images of Porcelain on Porcelain"

Cross Mackenzie Gallery is pleased to participate in the second annual FotoWeek DC festival with an exhibition of photographs and photographic prints on porcelain by renowned artist, Walter McConnell. McConnell, our gallery's most nationally recognized artist, has presented his fired and unfired installations in museums and cultural centers all over the country. Since his last show in Washington, he has shown in the Daum Museum, Mass Moca, the National Ceramic Education Convention in Arizona, and been awarded a prestigious Tiffany grant. While working in China, McConnell developed a technique of printing digital images on large slabs of white clay. Not only are his images printed on the porcelain surface, they also are images that reference his stacked Chinese porcelain sculptural installations.

McConnell's extravagant floor-to-ceiling ceramic creations made from hundreds of individual porcelain objects become greater than the sum of their parts. Made up of kitchy dwarves, Disney characters and your grandmother's favorite tchotckes piled high, the works culminate in a pyramidal form resembling an Asian Stupa. Quoted from a review of McConnell's last show, "McConnell's artistic sensibility transforms western pop cultural waste into an eastern aesthetic worthy of worship". We will also feature his photographic prints of silhouettes of classic porcelain form shapes Ð (vases, ewers, romantic figurines, candelabras etc.) massed into his iconic stuppa form. Professor McConnell, Head of the Ceramics Department at Alfred University in NY will be at the gallery for the artist's reception November 20th 6-8.

Digital images available upon request.