Beyond Inadequate Measure

Entrance is pleased to present _Beyond Inadequate Measure,_ the debut solo exhibition of Romanian-American multidisciplinary artist Ana Ion Leonte. Working across sculptural ceramics and drawing, Ion's work finds solace in the fleeting and mysterious. Influenced by the tactility of clay itself, Ion works in extremes, often pushing her sculptures to their physical limits. Central to Ion's practice is the idea that ceramic can be a volatile and unpredictable medium. To be a ceramicist, one must work much like a chemist, accurately mixing, measuring, timing, and hypothesising the results of an experiment. The artist must dissociate from the innate desire to be attached to their work, knowing at any moment in the process it could shatter from one small miscalculation. Ion finds inspiration in this vulnerability. Working at the precipice of balance and danger, Ion often creates and installs her work in precarious positions, literally pushing the medium to its tipping point. Ion makes her own glazes from scratch using combinations of iron, manganese, cobalt, zinc, and bone ash, materials that carry geological and bodily histories. When subjected to heat, these compounds produce unpredictable crystalline growths, accumulations, stains, and shifts in color. Central to her practice is a continual negotiation between control and surrender. Firing in a gas-powered kiln means slight variations in location, temperature, and oxygen levels can result in vast changes to glazes and surfaces. Occasionally firing her work up to 5 times, in addition to the lusters and puffy glazes she uses, means Ion can never guarantee how a finished work will come out. Through its physical properties, clay forces the artist to work in an intuitive way. Each moment dictated by the material itself, when the clay body is too wet it's too early, too dry and the moment has passed. Ion's work is large scale, made up of numerous parts accumulating into a larger whole; the process of producing sculptural ceramics is tactile and demanding on the body. In reference to her process, Ion notes it resembles something between a dance and a sport, she plays both offense and defense, resisting and accepting the material as they work together in a delicate, improvisational, balance. In her recent work Ion has expanded into a broader range of materials, now fabricating ceramic sculptures with fabric, steel, and even glass she has blown or fired herself, a departure from her previous work primarily fabricated solely in Earthenware clay. Ion's subject matter often deals with the fleeting and unseen. Cognizant of contemporary culture that doesn't seem to have time for mystery or myth, Ion focuses on the unknown and unrecognized: Sewers, tunnels, grates, the underground— things that many never stop to consider. A creature's whiskers and claws brushing by you, or an unidentified rustle up in a tree. Atmospheric noise, the mundane, remnants of something else, signifiers of time passing. Exhibited within the ground level gallery is the monumental work _Stinger Mass_. Reminiscent of organic masses that grow, dissolve, and replace themselves, that infect and remedy, contract and retract, all at once. The stinger recalls the ancient notion of the pharmakon, both remedy and poison, where the same gesture might strengthen one body and destroy another. Installed throughout the exhibition are a series of small-scale drawings. Produced in conversation with her sculptural ceramics, Ion sees these works as "impossible sculptures", concepts that have already been resolved on paper and need-not see physical form.