Jesse Small

Trees Can Dance, 2011
Digital Rain Egg I, 2011
Festival Detritus Descent I, 2009
More Wetter, 2007

Small’s chandeliers are not ceiling adornments and fixtures as we know them, nor are the folding screens part of our life experience.  These are sculptures parading or masquerading as decorative objects removed from the concept of decoration that challenge our perception of the everyday object.  Chandeliers dance across the gallery ceiling in steel, plastic and wood, sometimes kindled by LED lights that illuminate a variety of “bulbs.”  Punctuating the ceiling throughout the gallery, they lift the viewer’s eye above the gallery space to an exhibition aloft.

For the first time, Small creates a quasi-domestic environment, i.e., placing chandeliers over wood and plastic tables, which function as pedestals for his signature glazed porcelain pieces in the forms of ghosts (based on Pacman), super size eggs and talk bubbles.  Each porcelain is uniquely glazed with motifs in a range from primary and sunset colors, to pure gold, and black staccato drawing lines. His vanitas circles and ellipses reference vanitas paintings throughout art history, as well as mirrors. One cannot look into these mirrors and see a reflection, as the surfaces are etched and glazed, each unique and unto itself.

Small creates his sculptures in Los Angeles and in China: porcelains in China, which are later glazed, no two alike, in his Los Angeles studio, where he also builds his steel pieces.  Finding the whitest white of porcelains in the “china-making town” of Jingdezhen, Small works with local resources to create his pure shapes that have both elegance and reference to pop culture.  His ghosts, based on Pacman, became a language barrier banisher for the artist.  Like the ghosts and their banishment of barriers, Small casts away some of our “traditional” views of utilitarian objects in his dazzling new sculpture.

Jesse William Arthur Small was born in 1974.  He received a B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri and an M.F.A. from Alfred University, Alfred, New York.


The artist resides in Los Angeles, California.