Each of Nicole Cherubini’s pots is festooned with barnacles, adhesions, and mutations in polyhedron forms that look like alien spoors attacking the mother ship. The surfaces appear kneaded, dimpled and pocked in a way that streamlined “thrown” pots on a wheel could never be. This is no accident. Long, snake-like coils are stacked upon each other in circles building the piece from the bottom up, giving them the rough-hewn feel of objects dredged up from a quagmire. And historically, marshy bogs, fetid sinkholes, and gaseous swamps are the amniotic medium from which Cherubini’s constantly morphing, miniature barrier reefs are derived. It’s a specifically American tradition, equally oblivious to ancient Sumerians and Brancusi alike, that dates back to the 1870s, when the Brothers Kirkpatrick fired their first whisky jugs at the juncture of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in an area that came to be known as “Little Egypt.” Born on the bayou, indeed.

The Brothers Kirkpatrick made slyly subversive, though strictly utilitarian objects like matchsafes, drainage tiles, pig flasks, and stoneware bowls for reed-stemmed smoking pipes. Their Rabelaisian outsider “art” took the form of puns and double-entendres incised on their goods, and grotesque parables of entwined snakes understood as cautionary morality plays railing against demon whiskey. Still, their vulvular banks accepted actual coins, and smoke plumed effortlessly out of their pipes. Cherubini, on the other hand, is their distant cousin only in the sense that she takes deformity and impurity as a first principle. Like the Brothers, she rejects the enameled Japanoiserie of scarab vases as decorative kitsch, but she takes her pots further by eliminating their bottoms, arraying their lips in Pantone colored faux-fur, and puncturing holes in their sides as if shot up by crude gatling guns. Each pot is both literally and figuratively porous. Unity of form, after all, which generally takes on the aspect of smoothly taut skin with a poreless sheen, always stumps for the iconic silhouette - a holdover from retrograde Modernism and its Fischer Price toolbox of archetypes. Cherubini’s vessels are bruised, scabbed and cancerous; your hands don’t glide over them appraisingly as one would stroke a porcelain vase, but appear molten, volcanic - in advance of a burned finger.

Gold and silver chains of various thicknesses vomit out of lion’s mouths, in a burlesque of a true gargoyle’s original function. The word “gargoyle,” it’s worth noting, is etymologically derived from “gargle,” and once upon a time, before gargoyles became decorative talismans guarding entryways, or forbidding doorknockers making solicitors think twice, their actual function was to expel water from stone pipes. Not anymore. Cherubini’s gargoyles discharge the blinged out accoutrements of a self-appointed ghetto-fabulous culture itself in a decadent phase of decline. Liberace or Lil’ Wayne? “G’d up from the feet up,” but why should we care, Cherubini seems to ask. Locked and loaded with ridiculous amounts of what in the end amounts to chain link, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic becomes, in the final accounting, about as ruinous and decayed as a cement drainage ditch. The Monuments of Passaic become, in the hands of Cherubini, the Monuments of the Marcy Projects.

[excerpt of press release by David Hunt]

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