Trent Burkett: MISC.

February 14th – March 28th, 2015

Second Saturday Reception on February 14, 6 to 8 pm
Live Jazz by: Scott Collard (keys), Rob Lemas (bass) and Darius Dbaba Babazadeh (sax)

Trent Burkett is a potter, sculptor, and a professor of art. His refined technique blurs the line between craft and art within the diversity of his distinctive pottery. Burkett’s influences range from his love of the Sierra Nevada landscape to his understanding of East Asian aesthetics. He appreciates rugged essentialism and accepts the unexpected, which is expressed through his hand thrown intentions. By placing emphasis on strongly proportioned forms, rich surfaces, and the absence of overt imagery, Burkett finds ways to give his materials form and beauty without losing their original quality.

This one person exhibit will highlight his diverse approach to materials and the repurposing of objects to make sculptural narratives. Using recycled wood, ceramic forms, rock, stone and marble, along with his own porcelain sculpture and porcelain forms produced using molds, he has conceived totems, stratified layers of historic references, familiar and exotic. Burkett is an artist who could devote his entire career to the design and production of ceramic vessels, and be completely interesting. He was commissioned along with two other ceramicists to design and produce the tableware for the Michael Mina restaurant in San Francisco. Ceramics do remain a constant in the work, as he continues to broaden his expression through this new mixed media sculpture.

Burkett received his BA and MA from CSU Sacramento, and his MFA from the well regarded Ceramics program at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He now lives and maintains his studio in the San Louis Obispo area at Grover Beach.

Gallery hours:  Wednesday through Saturday 11 – 4

Categories: 2015, Exhibitions