Jane Margarette: A Honey Of A Tangle

About

Jane Margarette is a Los Angeles based artist working in ceramics and installation. For this exhibition at Anat Ebgi, she has made a suite of ceramic sculptures in her distinctive forms of locks, chains, keyholes, birds, and insects. Examining the lock as a symbol of strength, protection, sensuality, and captivity, Margarette’s works articulate a dichotomy of invitation and refusal, tempting viewers to touch and manipulate the mechanisms.

Recently Margarette’s sculptures evolved from ‘functional works’ such as door knockers, bicycle racks, toward absurdly large anthropomorphizing locks. Her wall-mounted sculptures live somewhere in the realm of mosaic tiling and blur delineations between 2-D paintings and 3-D sculpture. Small charm-like adornments of fruit, flowers, and teeth invite viewers to get closer to the works despite ominous elements such as bear traps and spiked collars.

Margarette’s fantastical locks are vibrant and playful in both palette and form, while retaining elements of brutality, domination, and hardness. The artist experiments with trompe l’oeil glazing effects, as many locks appear to be made from metal, emphasizing the delicate objects’ ambiguous power over its captives. Though they symbolize security, defense, and possession, the pieces are in fact fragile, ineffective in their projected purpose. Together the works in the exhibition explore tensions between hard and soft, logical and fantastical, open and closed.