Mindy Shrago / Moonscape III

South Florida native Mindy Shrago synthesizes and combines aspects of painting and sculpture in her thoughtful and diverse body of ceramic work which will be on view, along with new and recent pieces, in a career-spanning exhibition at Miami’s Club Gallery, opening January 20th, 2024. Throughout Shrago’s oeuvre, she has playfully questioned and redefined the boundaries of what is traditionally two and three dimensional. By juxtaposing flat, underglaze-painted subjects and landscapes with sculptural relief and fully three-dimensional forms, a visual metamorphosis occurs and the representational is released from the two-dimensional picture plane. This redefinition of space within her work creates a sense of freedom and an escape into utopian landscapes created with inspiration drawn from her love of the surrounding tropical South Floridian environment along with the colors and aesthetics of vintage Florida kitsch.

In earlier works, surrealistically sculpted pink flamingos, representing “elegance and serenity”, peel and stretch off of stark-white, geometric ceramic planes “contrasting, competing and demanding exploration”. Each one casts a long, dark foreboding Trompe l'oeil shadow, taking it out of the kitschy visual vernacular of tacky Floridian tourist traps into a somber space to contemplate our decimation of local wildlife and ecosystems. Looking back on her entire body of work Shrago says of the medium she has been devoted to throughout her entire artistic career “I find clay to be aesthetically adventurous, sensuous and alive. I am in tune with the material - one that is malleable and responsive to my touch. "Being" is submitted to a radical process of "Becoming", the transformation of matter by a mysterious natural process: that process involves certain risks which I find exciting.``