Angel Oloshove debuts a new series of ceramic sculptures and works on paper that examine how we project our emotions and perceptions onto physical landscapes.
(July 2023) “Angel Oloshove’s artistic practice is transformative, but that word isn’t enough to express the transcendent quality that her sculptures achieve through their color and form,” says Gallery Director Jordan Eddy, “In this body of work, Oloshove uses ceramics and innovative glazing techniques to formally link internal and external experience.” An opening reception with the artist will be held on Friday, July 28, 5–7 pm.
Oloshove’s first solo exhibition at form & concept, Emotional Landscapes encapsulates the artist’s latest study of the sublime: aesthetic beauty beyond explanation or measurement that can be breathtaking and terrifying. In playful conversation with 19th century Romanticism, Oloshove’s artwork celebrates nature’s ability to inspire authentic emotion. Evoking natural phenomenon, Oloshove’s cloud-like sculptures and airy pastel works serve as material distillations of subjective experience and symbolic bridges between emotional worlds and literal geographies.
But Oloshove remains critical of sentimentalization in her work, as sentimentalizing natural phenomena can diminish, and perhaps destroy, the unnameable quality of majestic spaces that stir human emotion. Colloquially known as the “Land of Enchantment” in the tourism industry, New Mexico itself is a sentimentalized state that typifies the moral and ethical questions surrounding the commodification of natural landscapes that lie at the center of Emotional Landscapes.
Angel Oloshove (b.1981) is a ceramicist who incorporates painterly glazes to express feelings of transcendental experiences through form and color. She balances a fine art practice oinf sculptural ceramics with a line of functional design pottery. Oloshove studied painting at California College of the Arts and worked in graphic design and toy development in Tokyo for six years before moving back to the U.S. She is a recent resident of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and has been recognized internationally for her achievements in ceramics.
