Review

With his artwork, Ian Shelly creates his own playground

Ian Shelly, detail of "Research." Image: courtesy of the artist

Hypothesis: If there is an exhibition that connects memories of recess sandboxes to today’s front page of the New York Times, while causing someone to temporarily leave all good behavior at the entrance with an unabashed exclamation of "Holy sh**!," then it is certainly Ian Shelly’s most recent exhibition.*

It's Elementary My Dear Watson is a successful and complex investigation on where, among other things, childlike naiveté and scientific rationalism converge. Excited playground shrieks rub together with questions of warfare in an atomic particle party of Eureka! moments.

Ian Shelly, of Lubbock, Texas, and receiving his MFA from the University of Missouri-Columbia, channels much of his childhood experiences in his artwork. "As adults we trust that things are the way they are because we were taught that way. But what if we ask 'Why?'" Image: courtesy of the artist

However, Ian Shelly is neither a scientist, nor is he a war strategist; and despite the toy tanks and Risk figurines scattered throughout his recent work, the ceramic artist wants you to know he is definitely not making any political statements. Raised in Lubbock, Texas, Shelly, 27, comes from a family full of craftsmen and tinkerers. His father was a chemistry professor at Texas Tech. His brother, Graham, is an endless strategist. "I grew up around people with such varied interests," he says. "I'm sort of like a big sticky ball, picking things up as I go."

On certain evenings after dinner, his father took Shelly and his brother to the lab. Though one million particles could frenetically dance in one of his father's experiments, on paper, there was nothing special about the place. "The lab was just like a Google image search," Shelly says. "They're all the same." Still, more than 20 years later, Shelly easily recalls the room's clean, sterile, chemical scent. The boys watched with excitement as their father dumped boxes of molecular models onto the countertops and floor. Even as a child, there was no separation of toys and science for Shelly. On the cold, tile floor, the brothers played among piles of crumpled paper and silent dust bunnies while cone-shaped vessels lined the shelves above them.

Strangely, Shelly's own studio is not that far from his boyhood playground. Only now, the dust bunnies are replaced by red clay remnants and post-show debris, sometimes a half-inch thick in the middle of the floor. Classic, cone-shaped, Erlenmeyer flasks have transformed into Shelly's own versions, significant symbols in his recent exhibition.

Images from chemistry textbooks and laboratory tools are a part of Shelly's genetic makeup as an artist. Although he admits he does not completely understand science, Shelly is inexplicably comfortable exploring and using the symbols that were constantly exposed to him as a child.

The cone is used throughout his sculptures, and Shelly constantly challenges its meaning as a "beneficial or detrimental" symbol. Clay, funnel-shaped, pseudo-humans are the protagonists of each work, peering collectively through scientific lenses, or wobbling alone at a miniature, handmade telescope. Large canvases adorn either end of the gallery, with more cone-beings hanging from miniature, metal swing stages, perhaps serving as window washers or painters. Recalling past science lessons, they seem to paint or rinse away sketches of abstract atoms.

Initially, the cones took the form of harmless and funny drawings. “Then they turned into pots," says Shelly, "and mutated into bullets, and became funnels."

The bullets took shape as Shelly's brother was deployed to Afghanistan. When his father was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the bullets morphed into orange, traffic blockades. An anxious chain of energy ran through the family as they wondered and worried, but Shelly could neither stop himself from making the cones, nor could he understand why he was obsessively creating them. In November 2008, Shelly's father died, but with his death, Shelly finally began to realize why the cone had manifested its way into his art. A relief settled over him.

"It's an elementary shape you make on the wheel," he says. "It's as simple as the cube, the sphere, or the cylinder. It can be a bullet or a barrier, but cones can also guide you in the right direction."

Ian Shelly, "Research," terra cotta, porcelain, engobe, underglaze, stain, nichrome wire, enamel, acrylic, wax, steel, wood, tar, polyurethane, cinder, dimensions variable, 2010. Image: courtesy of the artist

From a scientific and mathematical perspective, the cone is perfect and unquestioning in form. For Shelly, a kid who never really noticed the difference between tinker toys and DNA models, this "perfection" was the subject to turn upside-down for his recent show.

Shelly doesn't write abstracts or follow the rules of science or strategy. Although a chapter of his thesis is entitled "The Scientific Method," he does not begin his projects with a hypothesis or even the slightest plan. "I make by playing," he says. "Afterward I sit down and think about what I made and why." An anthropologist of his artistic process, Shelly possesses the ability to objectively empathize with a subject or discipline and still make the creation his own. He sees his subjects through the lens of a child, a soldier — even an optometrist phoropter.

"The show is a sequence of trust in things," says Shelly. "As adults we trust that things are the way they are because we were taught that way. But what if we ask 'Why?'"

Shelly's work inspires valuable discourse on the perception of our own activities. At what point does a plaything represent a perpetrator?

As if left out from their box, there are disheveled toys off in a corner — a reinvention of Risk where there are no continents to conquer, only soldiers to corner and destroy. Across the room, five jets hang statically between the floor and ceiling. Four resemble military aircraft. One, however, looks like a tiny model plane invented by the Wright brothers. By questioning our memory of childhood, perception of objects and thoughts on our own history, Shelly taunts us to play "Which of these things is not like the other?"

However, Shelly is not waging war. "I am not taking a political point of view," he says. "I am working really hard to steer the conversation in the opposite direction. Play is inevitable. War is inevitable. It's more important to develop an understanding of why these ideas are connected."

Ian Shelly, "Parts Sold Separately," terra cotta, porcelain, engobe, underglaze, stain, wood, acrylic, charcoal, steel, rope, sand, wood, dimensions variable, 2010. Image: courtesy of the artist

Situated in the center of the gallery and serving as the exhibition's climax, a post-apocalyptic sand castle, Parts Sold Separately, crumbles before us — either washed away by a natural source or our own doing. Even in the implied turmoil, there is a naïveté and whimsy to it all. Shelly is a skilled illusionist, as his nearly real fortress evokes our own childhood pipe-dreams and playthings. Here, miniature wooden tanks infiltrate the barriers of trompe-l'œil clay that imitates wood or rusty, aged metal. With his range of techniques, it is quite possible to forget that Shelly's first and primary medium is clay, a natural substance that is always somewhere under our feet.

Though It’s Elementary is clearly driven by installation and concept, Shelly prefers to identify as a potter rather than a ceramic artist.

“I appreciate the way a potter negotiates material and object,” he says. “I relate to that more.”

Similar to the scientific glassware in his father's lab, Shelly's pottery is an aesthetically pleasing, practical convergence of particles. Now that he has gradually entered the realm of process and concept driven sculpture, everything remains connected. Each piece in the current show informs another, and everything is at least a second permutation of a form that happened before it. As he continues to break down and pack up the show, Shelly splits the particles of his own creation as he plans to reuse certain pieces and recycle others into variations on familiar themes.

Cones can be found in much of Ian Shelly's artwork. Installation view of "It's Elementary My Dear Watson," the 27-year-old's latest exhibition. A counter-part exhibition to this thesis exhibition is scheduled at the Craft Studio Gallery in Memorial Union at the University of Missouri-Columbia, in July 2010 (open to the public). Image: courtesy of the artist

At the moment, Shelly is taking a well-deserved break. He would like to go into teaching, perhaps at a junior college, and though he is considering a multitude of career possibilities, for Shelly, the artwork shouldn’t have to fund more than itself: "I could never handle that pressure," he says. "I like the idea of always asking myself 'What do I want to make today? What sounds like fun?’"

Although there are still ideas to work through for a future exhibition, Shelly hopes to explore the idea of civilization and craft through another part of his childhood — Legos.

"A lot of my work explores a child's realm where the illogical is just as valued as the logical,” he says. “And everything is connected."

Note:

*It's Elementary My Dear Watson, Shelly's Masters of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, was shown at the George Caleb Bingham gallery at the University of Missouri-Columbia April 19 through 29, 2010.

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