In her choice of a sexy art historical adjective for a title, Jeannie Mah disrupts a persistent art historical soliloquy which has excluded ceramics. Chiaroscuro is a painters' term to describe the treatment of light and shade in a painting or a drawing to produce an illusion of depth or a dramatic effect. Aside from the obvious introduction to the two contrasting components of the installation, Chiaroscuro is an ironic title. Jeannie Mah's objects are three - dimensional: the illusion of her tableau is that they read, initially, as two-dimensional. Framed and glazed by the display cases, they appear to be two carefully composed paintings. As one looks more closely, the three dimensionality of Jeannie Mah's ethereal cups asserts itself, although the paper - thin, translucent and weightless objects are physically separate from the utilitarian world.

One of the tableaux is a store display berserk with energy and colour; the other resembles a staid display in an historical museum. The allusion to the museum is not wholly incidental to the reading of the work. The ceramics, gesturing mutely from behind and through the glass, are part of Jeannie Mah's continuing investigation which found its beginning in a museum visit.

I was in Crete in the spring of 1982 when a little ceramic cup of Middle Minoan Crete, 1600 - 1400 BC) caught my eye. Because my thoughts were on more hedonistic pleasures, I did not fully register the effect that it was to have on me.

This ordinary, humble, personal, utilitarian cup symbolized the concept of home, of comfort and sustenance, a respite from the outside world of society and politics, a sanctuary in which to replenish one's physical and mental needs so as to better cope with the exterior world.

Perversely, I started to glorify this cup. I imitated it in exaggerated and grandiose ways. I put it on a pedestal. I made a room to enshrine it. I drew its shadow, looming largely on the wall behind it. I miniaturized it and made it more fragile with patterns that pierced its walls.

The culmination of this investigation is the subject of the two tableaux in the Dunlop Art Gallery display cases.

... OSCURO ... hearkens back to the roots of euro-centric culture: the Minoans. Subdued, sombre, static, the larger of the two display cases has been lined with thin paper, softened and darkened by the rubbing of graphite into the surface. These gray cups are Jeannie Mah's refabrications of the functional, homely object she encountered in 1982. They are stand - ins for another era: their exaggerated fragility clarifies that they would have never survived the passage of time intact. A broken cup, its shards carefully arranged to an approximation of its original contour, occupies centre stage and pointedly underscores the dangerous journey of ceramic objects through the selective reconstruction of history. Several cups are mounted on faux classical cornices, mimicking the museum's tasks of preserving and legitimizing chosen objects. Her installation poses the question of what is not included in museums as well as putting a complex conceptual spin on the physicality of the ceramic object:

The black cups were like the memory of a cup, an imprint burned into our retina, relating more to Plato's world of `idea' or `form,' and of the essence of `cupness'. These cups were more mysterious and sombre, not quite in our reality. In their black and almost near - invisible state, they took on a predominance that real objects in our day - to - day world lack., for we understand real objects as concepts; we do no know them in our physicality.

Although the objects are intended for contemplation rather than physical use, it is difficult to see them, obscured as they are by the tenebres of historical memory.

... CHIARO ... is an immediate contrast. The sombre colours and static forms have been replaced by elegant - mannered - cups, brightly coloured and precariously posed. They are the chimeras engineered from Jeannie Mah's quiet pilfering of decorative and ceramic history. The elongated form developed as much from ancient vases as from haute couture of 1950's dresses. The motifs decorating the surfaces of the vessels were taken from Minoan and 18th century French sources and the saturated yellows and blues colouring all but the two white vessels flanking the installation were lifted from the characteristic colours of the Sèvres porcelain factory near Paris. Vessels in drag? Despite their recombinant historical sources, these vessels cavort and pirouette. They are marked with spiraling, wiry, eccentric handles. It is difficult not to anthropomorphize these objects as the characters in a melodrama. They operate as players or as dancers within a decorative mise-en-scène.

There are several directions the plot may take in Jeannie Mah's ceramic melodrama. The surface motifs, colours and markings as well as the unusual bases and handles, are teasing allusions to historical decoration. In a sense, these vessels are parodies of historical ceramics and question our expectations of ceramic form and the troubled relationship between sculpture and dinnerware, function and decoration, autonomy and context. Looking at them from another point of view, these vessels carry overtly feminine affectations, from their decorative qualities, to their unusual siting within a domestic environment, to the corporeal parallels which can be drawn to the body. As well, there is a persistent contradiction marking Jeannie Mah's work:the enigmatic nature of her objects is at odds with the obsessive precision of their construction. This is apparent in the anti-vessel which stands upright among the refined rubble at the bottom of the smaller display case. It has no opening, emphatically negating its functionality. Formally, the anti-vessel is the pivot point for the compositional vortex and conceptually acts as a footnote to the non-utility of Jeannie Mah's creations. Too `finished' and too frenetic to read as prototypes, these porcelain constructions are highly considered physical interpretations of `vessel'.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Chiaroscuro is that it is insistently temporal. The exaggerated fragility of her vessels, the memento mori shards on the floor below them and the subtle historical references in the work, all underscore a preoccupation with the passage of time. Her ceramics and shards, theatrically installed within lit and self - conscious sets, suggests a discontinuous narrative. She calls them allegorical vessels. Jeannie Mah's has contrived a field of open-ended gestures -- albeit in the static form of fired porcelain -- which read as a transhistorical mimesis embracing Bronze Age and Rococco periods as well as the here and now. The viewer vacillates between the actuality of the vessel and what it represents.

By "... approaching the imagination through reality," the vessels, through mimesis, are pushed to the limits of their materiality, past the literal and physical breaking point.

Through memory of image, fragmented forms from history exist only to shatter, then regroup again in varied permutations, as they evolve once more from their metaphysical state.

These chronically elusive cups hold a lot of water.

Helen Marzolf

Director / Curator

Dunlop Art Gallery