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Elyse Pignolet | |
|---|---|
| Born | Oakland, California |
| Occupation | Artist |
| Known for | Ceramics |
Elyse Pignolet is a visual artist living and working in Los Angeles, California.
|
Elyse Pignolet | |
|---|---|
| Born | Oakland, California |
| Occupation | Artist |
| Known for | Ceramics |
Elyse Pignolet is a visual artist living and working in Los Angeles, California.
Born in Oakland, California, Elyse Pignolet is an American with Filipino heritage. She studied fine arts at California State University, San Francisco. She continued her studies at California State University, Long Beach, on a CSU exchange program. In 2001 she lived in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, studying arts and Spanish. She completed her BFA degree at CSU Long Beach in 2007. Her studies included an intensive ceramics exchange through mainland China in 2007, and participation in the International Ceramics Biennal in Korea, also in 2007. Pignolet has conducted extensive research in Portugal, with an emphasis on "azulejo" tile painting techniques, as well as in Mexico City. Pignolet currently is based in Los Angeles, with a studio in San Pedro, California.
Elyse Pignolet works primarily in ceramics. The main themes she has pursued include social issues, topics from contemporary news articles, and urban themes. She has created several bodies of work that place the extensive history of ceramics in contrast with the temporary nature of graffiti. Other ceramics projects have juxtaposed the brash nature of political news headlines with the subtle shapes of traditional ceramic forms.
In 2016, Pignolet was commissioned by the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) to create a site-specific ceramic tile wall mural for the exhibition "American Qur'an". It is 16 feet high and 14 feet across, and features elaborate decorative designs and verses. In 2017, the artwork was acquired by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Oregon.
In 2016, Pignolet won a commission from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Dept. to design, fabricate, and install a large public mural at the Gaffey Street "Hey Rookie" Public Swimming Pool in San Pedro. The mural is some 10' high and more than 30' long, and features hand-made and hand-painted ceramic tiles which depict imagery from the history of San Pedro and the harbor area of Los Angeles, from the earliest days as a whaling outpost, to a Portuguese fishing village, a Japanese fishing village, a fish canning area, through Fort MacArthur in WWII, and on up to the contemporary bustle of its function as an international cargo port.
A book, The Depravities of War, featuring her work in printmaking, was released in Sept. 2007 from Grand Central Publishing in Santa Ana, CA.
An exhibition of her drawings were exhibited at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco in June and July 2008.
Her works have been featured in several contemporary arts publications including the LA Weekly, Juxtapoz Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.
Pignolet has often collaborated with artist Sandow Birk, most notably in large-scale print projects done with Mullowney Printing, both in Hawaii and in San Francisco. The projects have been very large scale woodblock prints dealing with social issues from the War in Iraq to American political history.
In 2019, Pignolet's work "American Procession" was featured in an exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art.
In spring of 2019, Pignolet had a solo exhibition of ceramic vessel works, hand-made and decorated with azulejo blue patterns containing subtle texts with referenced women's issues, sexual assault allegations, and catch phrases often demeaning to women. Her works have been lauded as part of a new wave of feminist works taking on contemporary social issues important to women.
In fall of 2019 she will have a solo show of new works at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles.
Pignolet has collaborated with other artists as studio assistant and in many public art projects. Working with Tom Barter, she has completed large scale public projects in Long Beach, CA, and Signal Hill, CA. She has also collaborated with Sandow Birk on three public projects in Los Angeles, CA, including the Tarzana Metro Station on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Orange Line, as well as the LAPD Hollenbeck Division Police Station murals in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles. More recently, she completed a huge tile mural project in San Pedro, commissioned by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department in 2016.
Elyse Pignolet was art director for the movie Dante's Inferno , in 2007. The film is told in toy theatre style puppetry and premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in January 2007. It won the Best Director Award at the Silverlake Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2007, and won the Audience Favorite Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2007.
Pignolet worked on the film "In Smog and Thunder" from Smart Art Press. She has appeared in videos for Quiksilver clothing company.
Azulejo is a form of Portuguese and Spanish painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework. Azulejos are found on the interior and exterior of churches, palaces, ordinary houses, schools, and nowadays, restaurants, bars and even railways or subway stations. They are an ornamental art form, but also had a specific functional capacity like temperature control in homes.
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
Sandow Birk is an American visual artist from Los Angeles whose work deals mainly with contemporary American culture. Seven books have been published on his works and he has made two films. With an emphasis on social issues, his frequent themes have included inner city violence, graffiti, various political issues, travel, prisons, surfing and skateboarding. His projects are often elaborate and epic in scale, including a series on "The Leading Causes of Death in America" and the invasion and the second war in Iraq. He completed a hand-made illuminated manuscript version of the Qur'an, transcribing the English language text by hand in a personalized font based on graffiti, and illuminating the pages with scenes of contemporary American life.
Joan Takayama-Ogawa, is an American ceramic artist and educator. She is sansei (third-generation) Japanese-American, and a professor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. Takayama-Ogawa's heritage since the 15th century of Japanese ceramic art influences her work, that usually explores beauty, decoration, ornamentation and narrative while also introducing a dialogue that rejects the traditional role of women in Japanese culture. Her most recent work addresses issues like climate change.
Edith Kiertzner Heath was an American studio potter and founder of Heath Ceramics. The company, well known for its mid-century modern ceramic tableware, including "Heathware," and architectural tiles, is still operating in Sausalito, California, after being founded in 1948.
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Dante's Inferno is a 2007 comedy film performed with hand-drawn paper puppets on a theater stage. The film was adapted from the book "Dante's Inferno" by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, a modern update of the canticle Inferno from Dante Alighieri's epic poem Divine Comedy. The film chronicles Dante's journeys through the underworld, guided by Virgil. The head puppeteer was Paul Zaloom and the puppets were designed by Elyse Pignolet and drawn by Sandow Birk. The film premiered January 20, 2007 at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival. The film has also been shown at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Newport Beach Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, Silver Lake Film Festival, the Boston Underground Film Festival, and on the Ovation TV cable network.
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JB Blunk (1926–2002) was a sculptor who worked primarily in wood and clay. In addition to the pieces he produced in wood and ceramics, Blunk worked in other media, including jewelry, furniture, painting, bronze, and stone.
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Hannah Stouffer is an American artist, illustrator and art director living and working in Los Angeles, California. She became known through her art exhibitions, as well as for her contributions to the making of individual and collective art installations and murals worldwide. As a book author, her curatorial review of contemporary ceramics and its methods The New Age of Ceramics has received distinct attention in specialized art sources. Stouffer also acted as curator and designer of illuminated works Lust for Light, printed and distributed by Gingko Press.
Grace Richardson Clements (1905–1969) was an American painter, mosaicist, and art critic. She was active as an artist in the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s.
Dora De Larios was an American ceramist and sculptor working in Los Angeles. She was known for her work's clean lines and distinctive glazes, as well as for her line of tableware created under her family-run company Irving Place Studio. Also a muralist working with tile, De Larios was noted for her style, which reflects mythological and pan-cultural themes.
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Polia Pillin, née Sukonic or Sunockin, was a Polish-American ceramist during the 20th century. Born in Częstochowa, Poland, in 1909, she immigrated to the United States in 1924 and settled in Chicago, Illinois. In 1927, she met and married Ukrainian immigrant William Pillin. They lived near Albuquerque, New Mexico, from 1936-1940; Chicago from 1940-1948; and finally Los Angeles, California, from 1946 until their deaths.
Chris Gustin is an American ceramicist. Gustin models his work on the human form, which is shown through the shape, color, and size of the pieces.
Sinem Banna is a Turkish-American artist currently living and working in both San Francisco, California, and her home town of Istanbul, Turkey and exhibits internationally.
Johanna Poethig is an American Bay Area visual, public and performance artist whose work includes murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations. She has split her practice between community-based public art and gallery and performance works that mix satire, feminism and cultural critique. Poethig emerged in the 1980s as socially engaged collaborations with youth and marginalized groups gained increasing attention; she has worked as an artist and educator with diverse immigrant communities, children from five to seventeen, senior citizens, incarcerated women and mental health patients, among others. Artweek critic Meredith Tromble places her in an activist tradition running from Jacques-Louis David through Diego Rivera to Barbara Kruger, writing that her work, including more than fifty major murals and installations, combines "the idealist and caustic."
Jane Bauman is an American painter, sculptor, and academic. She has been a professor and Chair of the Visual and Performing Art Department at Coastline Community College in Newport Beach, California. As a working artist, she is very active in the Southern California art scene.