March 26, 2003

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PLACE A CLASSIFIED AD | PERSONALS | MOVIE CLOCK | REP CLOCK | SEARCH

'Made to Serve: Functional Art by Andrew DeWitt'
Through April 12, Parlor Projects

TOO WEIRD FOR a craft gallery and too crafty for a commercial fine-art gallery, Andrew DeWitt's work may have found a niche at Parlor Projects. DeWitt is a clay artist who makes functional things: items like plates, cups, and spoons, art you can look at and eat from. If you wanted to be highfalutin about it, you could call his work "interactive installation art." Bring it home, run it through the dishwasher, and make it a combination table service and conversation piece. DeWitt had this in mind, he says, back when he was working on his "family series," a group of plates that featured images of very conventional-looking nuclear families. Depending on the user's domestic situation, the plates could either reiterate that value system or seem ironically and humorously dissonant, especially when used to serve meat loaf or something equally down-home. For this show he's put together several series, including "regular people" whose faces are on the whole maybe a little less attractive than average, a fabulous bunch of weird creatures, old-fashioned newspaper food ads, and some little ceramic spoons decorated with leering, almost frightful faces – probably not suitable for grandma's spoon collection. Working in clay allows DeWitt to trespass across the traditional art-world boundaries separating mass-produced from handmade, fine art from craft, and even complete from in-progress. Clown Plate is a good example; it's fired, glazed, and "finished" as a functional ceramic object, but DeWitt has decorated it to look like a paint-by-number kit that someone left only halfway complete. It declares itself a product of creative effort, and then denies it in the next breath. It is art or not-art? And more important, do you hang it on the wall or put food on it? Tues.-Fri., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sat., by appointment, 1311 Church, S.F. (415) 824-1311. (Lindsey Westbrook)