epamenoi ti de tis; ti d ou tis; skias onar,
anthrropos, all otao aigla diosdotos elthh,
lamprow pheggos epestin andron kai melikos aion.
Pindar 1
Susan Mollet's installation Happy Birthday consists of 169 ceramic boxes arrayed around the gallery walls. The boxes are small; none are more than three inches in their longest dimension. Glazed an intense lime yellow-green with a red overglaze of geometric and text elements, the boxes continue Mollet's incorporation of textuality into ceramic objects, while differently deploying the form of the ceramic object as signifier.
Mounted on the gallery walls, the boxes are in the physical space of the gallery, their three-dimensionality emphasized by the shadows they cast on the wall. This physicality matters; it is a co-presence with the viewer. The boxes are in three staggered rows centered at the artist's eyelevel, with additional boxes placed well above and below eyelevel. The boxes are open on the top, their hollowness declared by the die-cut paper packing material filling and emerging from them. In the physical space of the gallery, the boxes are present but in wrapping around the space, are not all-at-once present in simultaneous availability to the viewer's perception. In not being simultaneously available to perception, the perception of the boxes qua objects, like their surfaces and the glaze pattern and text applied to the surfaces, requires a temporal duration for reception.
Reception is of what is given, of what is presented. Presents, perhaps especially birthday presents, are always personal, and thus are essentially private, some thing presented by one person to another. We place the present in a box, packed carefully and wrapped festively, to denote its specialness as a gift. Multiplying a box for a present qua object 169 times, and arraying these objects around the gallery walls, shifts the inherently private act of gift-giving to the public domain. The texts incorporated by overglazing onto the objects are likewise shifters from the personal to the public domain, signifiers of a content that is contextual. Within the public domain, the individual subsists as a locus instantiating the political. This is evident in the work on scrutiny of the dark blood-red glazed texts referencing stem cells, and their application in the treatment of cancer. Marking and celbrating the artist's brother's fight against cancer, the title of the installation, Happy Birthday, from the hospital's reference to the day of his stem cell transplant as his "new birthday." The work, and particularly the texts glazed onto the surfaces of the boxes, engages the field of discourses surrounding stem cell research, ansd is thus positioned at the liminal zone between the individual and private, the public and political. Indeed, simply in its installation within the gallery, the work has transited this liminality to enter the political, as do all artworks on being presented. The inference that all artworks are political, engage such fields of discourse and occasions of conversation as they may, follows from this. That also is not a small present.
Susan Molllet teaches ceramics and glaze classes at Brookhaven College School of the Arts. Mollet received the Bachelor of Science from Southwestern University, and the Master of Fine Arts and Master of Education from Texas Womans University.