David Shaner at the Archie Bray Foundation - Helena, Mont - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 2002 by Janet Koplos

The two dozen ceramic objects in this show, made over a 30-year period, included wall pieces, a vase, an early tea bowl and teapot, and several plates, but the focus of the show was the small abstract sculptures of David Shaner's later career. This was one of many summer exhibitions across Montana celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Archie Bray Foundation, a ceramic residency program. Shaner, who lives in Bigfork, Mont., was resident director at the Bray, as it is familiarly called, from 1963 to '70.

Shaner is celebrated in ceramic circles for stabilizing the Bray and securing its first NEA grant, and he is also beloved as an individual not swayed by trends. He once wrote in an artist's statement, "My pots are not about risk taking. They are about serenity--clarity--simplicity. Some people like to climb mountains. I like to walk through meadows of wildflowers." He is also noted as a gardener who has grown, among other things, 100 varieties of day lilies.

Thus it's no surprise that landscape motifs are featured in many of his works. Flathead Lake (1975) is a 12 1/2-by-16-inch slab set on a stand for pictorial viewing. Bands of tan-brown earth colors settle in below a purple-blue swath with a dark brown scalloped profile above it, minimally suggesting lake and mountains. The physical presence of the nearly inch-thick slab contrasts with the softness of the glaze imagery. Cirque--A River Runs Through It (1995) is one of Shaner's signature contoured "pillows." This one, a big oval measuring 20 by 24 inches, might be a topographic map of a Montana valley; irregular ridges on the top meet in a central channel of stepped levels. But its black manganese crystalline glaze evokes the cosmos more than earth.

Shaner's most moving works lean toward abstraction. Boulder and Stone (ca. 1983) is a sphere of darkness, 14 inches in diameter, its top gently but insistently pushed in by a dark-speckled white object that suggests an egg as much as a stone. Despite its substantiality, this Noguchi-like form looks pneumatic enough to breathe or to float away. Shield (1997), a splotched blue-black plate 18 inches in diameter, has a wide rim featuring a raised contour that might be described as a circle on the verge of turning into a spiral. Suggestive of an Indian burial mound, this thick contour is a reductive gesture that leads the eye and mind into the unknown. Pentagon (1993) is a double-walled low bowl 20 inches in diameter with a five-sided interior. In this work, the black crystalline glaze that dominated the show combines with ideal geometric form. Plateau (1996), with its recessed square and protruding hemisphere in the dark speckled glaze, is a view of the heavens or a mystical vision poured into a stabilizing geometry. Shaner skillfully combines the literalness of clay with its abstract potentialities, and the organic with the rational.