Opening Night for Alexia Benavent and Jenny Day Ceramic Exhibitions

Alexia Benavent’s De Aqui, De Allá and Jenny Day’s Happy Birthday Stinky bring a power pair of new sculptural exhibitions the Morean Center for Clay on April 11, 5-9pm.

Benavent shares her ceramic dominos, relief photo tiles, and colorful banana bunches in a celebration of connecting with home and identity. Day displays an army of whimsical clay creatures surrounding an imaginary birthday party, using the fantastic and mystical to edge worry away.

When you see Benavent’s work, the first thing you will come to realize is its deep connection to place, exploring fragility through use of soft and hard materials.

“In a diaspora, often the only thing you can take from your home are memories. Suddenly everything can be a reservoir of memory,” Benavent says. “Old photos of a favorite restaurant, a bowl you used every day from your mother’s kitchen, even rusty tools from a childhood home can become treasured keepsakes and tangible connections to places that are not the same and may only exist now in this handful of remembrances. In a world that so strongly wants to deny you a place, they take you back to a time you didn’t even realize was so precious. Anything too big to fit in a suitcase is left behind forever. Items like photos are some of the last reminders of a home now long gone.”

Day’s work, by default, holds a deep reverence for the natural world, concerns about climate change and natural disaster. Lately, however, she has created another landscape populated by an army of friendly creatures.

“Here burdens are dismissed by the whimsical,” Day says. “Happy Birthday Stinky invites viewers to attend a birthday party for a skunk, complete with a dinosaur piñata, cake, ice cream, presents, balloons, and pizza.”

In the exhibition, the apocalyptic is supplanted by the surreal and the allegorical. Outside influences still seep in, broken ceramic windows let in a flurry of leaves, cigarettes, old tin cans, a dead bluejay. Day’s work often flirts with how the world might end, while simultaneously finding ways to adapt, recreate, and live on.

Enjoy both exhibitions Wednesday to Saturday,10am-5pm, on view April 11 through May 2.

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Host or Publisher Morean Arts Center