March 15 – May 25, 2025
Curated by David East
Main Gallery
Renata Cassiano Alvarez, La Carne y el Hueso. Photo credit: Kes Efstathiou and Forrest Frederick. 
Renata Cassiano Alvarez, Rostros como Agua. Photo credit: Kes Efstathiou and Forrest Frederick. 
Magdolene Dykstra, Framed Landscape. 
Magdolene Dykstra, “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two my life flows.” (Detail), site-specific installation at A-B Projects (LA). 
Sam Mack, Installation View. 
Paige O’Toole, bbb. 
Paige O’Toole, sf1. 
Nicole Seisler, Accumulation+of+Minimization. 
Nicole Seisler, Perching,+Clinging.
In Touch showcased a group of artists who engage with, and utilize, notions of touch from a broad perspective–through the core act of forming and leaving one’s imprint, to the broader implications of agency within the material, and meaning accruing within process.
Material exploration and critical engagement move through multiple approaches and frames of reference, all with a distinct position in regards to how touch informs all of our senses. This exhibition brings together distinct objects, transitory actions, and work created on site. Occurring in clay’s multiple states, from the transient to the geologic, this exhibit seeks to actualize the unique potential of ceramics through the language of touch to engage with ideas of identity, place, and transformation.
Participating artists include:
Renata Cassiano Alvarez, Magdolene Dykstra, Sam Mack, Paige O’Toole, and Nicole Seisler.
About the Artists
Renata Cassiano Alvarez, a Mexican-Italian artist born and raised in Mexico City, explores the interplay between material and process in her work. Her artistic practice centers on cultivating a deep connection with the materials she uses, delving into their varied languages and forms. Influenced by archeology and the collective Latin American experience, she believes in the power of the object as survival and witness to transformation and endurance over time, binding us to a sense of continuity.
Cassiano Alvarez’s work has been showcased internationally and is part of numerous public and private collections worldwide. She divides her time between her studios in Veracruz, Mexico, and Springdale, Arkansas, USA.
Cassiano Alvarez earned her BFA from Universidad Veracruzana (Xalapa, Mexico) and her MFA from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is the recipient of numerous awards including several residency fellowships from the Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center (Skælskør, Denmark), Lanzhou City University (China), and the Master Artist Residency Fellowship at Clay Gulgong (Australia). Her most recent worldwide exhibitions include shows at Galería Banda Municipal (CDMX, Mexico), Lucy Lacoste Gallery (Concord, MA), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alfredo Zalce (Morelia, Mexico), and Site Gallery (Sheffield, England). Cassiano-Alvarez divides her time between her studios in Veracruz, Mexico and Springdale, AK where she serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Arkansas (Fayetteville).
Magdolene Dykstra is a second-generation Egyptian-Canadian artist educator. Her work in sculpture, installation, and mark-making is grounded in research of feminist political ecology, anti-capitalism, and craft. Dykstra uses sculpture, installation, and mark-making to visualize, actualize, and reconfigure connections between human and more-than-human bodies across space and time, disrupting the fantasy of an independent self. She states, “We humans are a part of one heaving organism, entangled and tumbling over one another.”
Her work meditates on the power of the small when gathered into a collective, prioritizing accretive processes that depend on consistent effort over time. Working with clay, wood, and fiber facilitates an exploration of broader notions of kinship that transgress suggested boundaries of us versus them, self versus other.
Existing along a spectrum of becoming and undoing, Dykstra’s work reflects on the transience of our collective existence, full of the potential for continual change. She embraces ephemerality and precarity for their poetic and anti-capitalist potential. Each of her works is impermanent and embedded with the possibility of transformation, waiting to be refashioned in an alternate configuration. In this way, they exist as a momentary pause in a never-ending process of emergence and decay, a cycle of deconstruction and reformation.
After studying both biology and visual arts (BS and BA respecitvely from Houghton College, NY) as an undergraduate, she earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond). She also holds an MS Ed from Niagara University (Lewiston, NY).
Dykstra has participated in residencies at the Medalta Historic Clay District (Medicine Hat, AB), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Newcastle, ME), and Concordia University (Montreal, QC). Dykstra has been awarded several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, including Research and Creation Grants, Exhibition Assistance Grants, and Arts Abroad Grants. She has been recognized by the National Conference on Education for the Ceramic Arts as a 2024 Emerging Artist and received the 2024 Helene Zucker Seeman Fellowship for Women. Notable exhibitions include site-specific installations at the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON), Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery (Waterloo, ON), and the Art Gallery of Burlington (ON), as well as solo exhibitions at the Jane Hartsook Gallery (New York) and A-B Projects (Los Angeles).
Sam Mack uses clay, metal, found objects, and other materials to create sculptural works and vessels that ideally communicate a response to the site in which they are viewed. Each installation is a discussion between the visible artworks and the “intentionally invisibilized…unseen forces” in the space around them. Mack states, “The installed objects reference strategies of survival, pleasure, and refusal used by queer and trans people in the US to navigate the expanding obstacles of systemic bureaucratic exclusion. Tools, consumer objects, and artifacts are remade as non-functional clay forms individually constructed to crack, resulting in surface variation that values rips, fissures, and evidence of action.”
Mack earned a BFA in Studio Art from University of Missouri (Columbia) and an MFA in Studio Art from University of Arkansas (Fayetteville). They have shown nationally and internationally at the JEAE International Arts Center (Jingdezhen, China), the Aichi Ceramics Museum (Seto City, Japan), and The Clay Studio (Philadelphia). Mack is also the recipient of the 19th annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize (Baltimore, MD).
Paige O’Toole is a ceramic artist from the Hudson Valley region of New York (Garrison). Focusing on the intersection of gender, space and the domestic, her work explores themes of memory through gesture, and illusion through perception. O’Toole’s mark in clay is both immediate and archival, lasting and tangible evidence of her insatiable touch.
O’Toole earned a BA in Art History and BFA in Ceramics from State University of New York at New Paltz. She is a recent MFA graduate from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. O’Toole is currently a long-term resident at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA).
Nicole Seisler creates dialogue and perspectives around ceramics that exist in the same conditions as the material: malleable, shifting adaptable, and enduring; existing within, between, and beyond conventional definitions.
Seisler comments, “I hold the clay, and the clay holds me back. This is how it has always been…except for that moment in grad school when I broke up with clay. I had convinced myself that I didn’t want to be limited by clay or pigeonholed as a ceramic artist; I swore that clay and I were done. It took me all of two painful, uncentered weeks to come crawling back.
This temporary fissure with clay marked the beginning of my mission to reclaim and reshape what it means to be a ceramic artist. I became an artist because I wanted to learn to see the world differently. I am a ceramic artist because clay allows me to see myself differently in the world. Clay is a conduit that grounds me in myself, connects me to others, and embeds me in place. “
Three interdependent, mutually-reinforcing areas comprise Seisler’s practice: making, educating, and curating. This tripod enables each aspect to support the others, thereby creating a platform for her broader, pluralistic vision for ceramics as a conceptual field.
Seisler earned her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA) and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She has exhibited her work at museums ranging from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA) and the Museum of Fine Arts Tallahassee (FL) to the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago) and Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles). Her work was recently featured in a solo exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), and the two-person exhibition In Hand: Contemporary Material Engagements with the Built World at the Kennedy Museum at Ohio University. (Athens).
Seisler has taught ceramics for almost fifteen years at as many universities including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), the University of Washington (Seattle), Scripps College (Claremont, CA), and UCLA. She is currently Assistant Professor and Head of Ceramics at Lewis & Clark College (Portland, OR). As Founder and Director of the contemporary ceramics platform, A-B Projects, Seisler has curated forty exhibitions and offers alternative educational programming that reevaluates and redefines the trajectory of contemporary ceramics.