Dominique Ostuni
Dominique Ostuni's Would an Angel Apologize for Spilling Champagne? is an enthralling installation by the Bowdoinham, Maine-based artist known for her exquisite hand-built porcelain sculpture. The exhibition, for which the artist has created an immersive environment extending throughout the gallery's first floor, is Ostuni's second solo show with Dowling Walsh.
In this body of work, Ostuni begins with objects that already know how to behave: lamps, mirrors, vessels, the figure. "I'm interested in the moment when usefulness becomes unstable," she says, "when an object can still perform its function but has begun to slip away from its original purpose, the moment when the object starts to misbehave."
Working primarily in porcelain, Ostuni treats the ceramic surface like an enormous sheet of paper, drawing and gilding until function starts to wobble. It is never allowed to remain neutral. Instead, it becomes theatrical, sentimental, sometimes absolutely ridiculous, "a practical object caught behaving badly! Tsk, tsk," she says humorously.
The domestic becomes Ostuni's stage for questions of taste, intimacy, and value. In recent works, bronze figures dance atop ceramic lamps, porcelain elements surround an illuminated mirror nearly eight feet wide, tiered chandeliers extend into the room's architecture, and figures from art history make an appearance. Even the pedestal has become part of the work, pierced with small chambers where figures are encountered almost privately.
Across the exhibition, the scale of work shifts constantly between the intimate and the architectural, yet the artist's hand remains visible throughout. Ostuni is especially drawn to historical forms like spill vases, objects that have somehow outlived their usefulness yet remain irresistible. And, she says, "to the strange authority ornament demands when there is simply too much of it to dismiss."
The line between art and object becomes increasingly unreliable. Things ask to be used and contemplated at once, as though usefulness itself might be another material, and beauty a function with no practical end. Ostuni is not interested in making useful things useless in order to call them sculpture. She keeps the usefulness, and lets everything else pile on. Excess comes naturally. Rather than apologize for it, she invites the viewer to swim in the gluttony with her.
Dominique Ostuni received her BFA in ceramics from Maine College of Art and Design. She has been a resident artist at CRETA in Rome, Italy. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and shows across the United States and abroad and is in many collections worldwide. She lives in the woods of Bowdoinham, Maine, where she works from her studio along the Cathance River.