Resident artist show featuring works by Kevin Snipes
Kevin Snipes is an American artist born in Philadelphia and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA in ceramics and drawing from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1994 and concluded graduate studies at the University of Florida in 2003. He works primarily in ceramics, blurring the boundary between craft and art. Snipes combines techniques of narrative figure drawing, text, and hand-formed porcelain constructions to create objects that can be seen as multi-layered paintings.
Kevin has participated in many artist residency programs, often maintaining an itinerant existence. Through both national and international residencies including The Clay Studio, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, New Castle, Maine, and Wesleyan College in Georgia, he has allowed a sense of place to augment his sense of identity and contribute to the dialog of his work. He has exhibiting nationally and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Konkling Gallery at Minnesota State University, Mankato and Plinth Gallery, Denver.
Artist's Statement:
My artistic practice is deeply rooted in exploring the social construct of “otherness.” Working in porcelain, I incise contemporary narrative drawings into the surface—etching stories that investigate how and why we define some individuals as part of “us” and others as outsiders. The human and animal figures I create on the surface of my hand-constructed porcelain vessels are drawn in a linear, stylized style reminiscent of black-and-white comics. The figures are intentionally left uncolored, their bodies formed from the creamy white of the porcelain itself—an aesthetic choice that speaks to both equality and erasure, ambiguity and possibility.
Porcelain itself becomes a metaphor in this narrative: fragile yet resilient, delicate yet enduring. My characters exist on multiple sides of the vessels, and every side assumes that they are the protagonist of the story that I am telling. This multiplicity invites the viewer to see from many perspectives at once reflecting a world where identity is fluid and layered, and no one story holds the whole truth.
