This weekend, it’s our second entry in our holiday weekend series, highlighting the work of a single artist over a two-day period. It’s also one of my favorites — both the person and her work: It’s the pottery of Camille Bernal.
You’ve already met Camille here before; she’s Wings’s niece, and lives just down the road. She’s an incredibly talented ceramicist and a good friend besides. Her work blends tradition with a host of influences and motifs that have made her style uniquely her own, one that’s deceptively simple on the surface, but containing layers of complexity. Her work is the sort that, the more I look at it, the more I see it in new ways, and the more I love it.
That’s the mark of a talented artist: one able to show you something new every time you look at a single piece.
Today’s featured piece is one such: a simple Art Deco-style vase with classic lines, painted in a repeating two-color design. If you were to see it on a shelf in a gallery anywhere else, you would likely assume that it is an Art Deco Revival piece.
Here, though? Here, it’s an olla, a water jar, an integral component of daily life since time immemorial. From its description in the Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the Web site:
This compact vase evokes one of the first heydays of modern Indian pottery. Fashioned in Art Deco style by Camille Bernal (Taos Pueblo), it’s hand-coiled of a a beautifully warm red clay, accented with a gentle pastel shade, hand-painted long-stemmed flowers arising delicately from the base and encircling the whole. Vase stands 7-1/8″ high by 4.5″ across at the widest point, with a 1-1/8″ opening at the lip (dimensions approximate). Top view shown below.
Tewa clay; plant-based paints
$250 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
There is perhaps no better piece to showcase Camille’s ability to synthesize disparate motifs, to integrate symbols seemingly diametrically opposed to each other, than this one. It’s a perfect tribute to the reality of our lives as contemporary Native people, people who now have no choice but to walk in two worlds, and who daily navigate that rift in ways comfortably invisible to the dominant culture.
As noted above, the ordinary viewer would look at this piece and perhaps see a classic Art Deco-style vase . . . which it is. And yet . . . .
Art Deco is shorthand for Arts Décoratifs, or, more completely, for the name of the famed 1925 Paris exhibition, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (in English, the International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts). And, indeed, “decorative” and “industrial” both were very much the essence of the style it embodied.
Art Deco arose as a successor to Art Nouveau, taking hold after the War to End All Wars (otherwise known, eventually, as World War I). It was a time when the Western world had wearied greatly of conflict brought home to roost, but not at all of the colonialism in which it such conflicts are rooted. Marked by an unbridled faith in the twinned shibboleths of “technology” and “progress,” it was characterized by a love of extravagant beauty, and of profligate spending to acquire it.
Now, don’t get me wrong: In art, architecture, and fashion, the Art Deco Period is for me tied with a couple of others for the title of “favorite.” The surface imagery of the era is one that I dearly love — but that doesn’t blind me to the existential flaws in the foundation of its towering style, nor to the harms to indigenous peoples the world over that accompanied it heyday.
But for purposes of today’s feature, I want to focus on Art Deco’s identity as a paean in visual and tangible form to technological and social “progress.” It’s a faith in change, but it’s also a faith in cultural dominance, and one of a very specific sort . . . one that has not been particularly good for our peoples. So why would a Native artist want to adopt the style?
How better to expose the shibboleths of a dominant culture, to render them mute and moot, than to take control of its artistic manifestations, to assume and assert dominion over them, ultimately, to subvert them and remake them into something truer, something that reflects our peoples’ own reality?
And so taking a shape and style that is one of the most significant hallmarks of European modernism, and dominant-culture extravagance and excess, and using it to create a piece in her own indigenous tradition, a piece in the form of something much more ancient?
Now that’s subversive.
And it’s not merely the shape, combining something dating back millennia with something extremely modern. It’s the ornamentation. The floral pattern is exactly the sort one would expect to find on genuine Art Deco pottery and clayware — but it’s rendered in warm, earthy red tones on a yellow ochre created by Camille’s own hand from the plants that dot the canyons in the Taos Pueblo area. It takes a style that placed its faith in commercial syntheticism, and turns it back into something wholly natural.
That’s subversive, too, and it works as an object lesson about the importance of tradition, of history, of what’s essential: A style dependent to a significant degree on artificiality is taken back to an earlier day and rendered, true to form and detail, in wholly Nature-based substances.
My guess is that Camille had no conscious intent to do any of these things in creating this piece. She simply followed the vision in her mind’s eye where it led. But to at least these two viewers, it’s what she accomplished. And by that token, it becomes a piece with cultural, social, and political significance as well as great artistic beauty.
Tomorrow: One of Camille’s miniatures, brightening a cold winter’s day.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
