American critics have lined up to praise Shio Kusaka’s poised porcelain pots, and one can see why. This show’s arrangement of 67 predominantly white pieces by the Japanese-born, LA-based artist, arranged on a table in a grid that is coherent at its edges but wobbles inside it, quietly hymns the slow satisfaction of looking. At first, particularly if your sense of hierarchy is thrown by such explicitly craft-based objects being positioned as art, you may just see typologies: big-mouthed bowls, squat or slender vases. Over time, however, the eye happily homes in on idiosyncrasies, feeling distinction: the appealing rubbery lip of one, a softly crazed grid scored into another.
Japanese Raku pottery, most famously, builds imperfections into itself – thumbprints, for example. This seems like one of Kusaka’s organising principles. Another is a crossover between pottery and high art. Many of her works are painted or incised with shimmering fields of tiny dots, quivery stripes or wayward chevrons. Pay attention, and you’ll stop seeing pots and start seeing three-dimensional paintings, objects that take lines for strolls around their circumferences. Kusaka may never lose sight of the crafted object and gets much mileage from a simple contextual shift, but the afterglow of her work isn’t that far removed from the one you’ll get from, say, the paintings of Morandi, the obvious parallel on the other side of the art/craft divide. That is, guiltless pleasure delivered in measured bursts.