Blackfish Gallery

June 2021
with guest Careen Stoll

This is a show about drinking.

Alcohol and bread seem to be ubiquitous to humanity. Every culture that could grow some kind of grain figured out how to bread it, and every culture that realized old food could have intoxicating effects figured out how to ferment for imbibing. It’s a staggering range of commonality for humanity: from Appalachian bourbon to Irish whiskey to Italian wine and grappa, to Greek ouzo or Russian vodka, to Japanese sake, Chinese bijou, or Korean soju, to English beer and gin, to Ethiopian mead, Venezuelan rum and Mexican tequila. We’re all human, we all have food that goes bad, and we all drink.

Whether part of sacred rituals, or for medicinal purposes, or for conviviality and celebration, or spilling over into the trials of excess and addiction, spirits have potently manifested themselves as inherent to our cultures.

“Up the bottom” is what a former sculpture professor used to say by way of a toast, instead of “bottoms up.” The baskets filled with shooters are a tribute to a memory of potluck dinners during my grad school years; John Neely has a very large bowl filled with little shooter cups from multiple generations of students and fellow artists. Some of us used to linger at his house well into the wee hours of the morning; he would get out the liqueurs he likes to make and pull down that large bowl. And we would raid that bowl, pulling out all those little cups to explore, each of us trying to find the right one for the evening, the right absent friend to share the moment with.

These bottles and cups hearken to a sense of ritual, not so much high and lofty and religious so much as vessels intended to house one’s spirit of choice and wait for the moment of sharing and imbibing. Each bottle and cup is unique, thanks to the hell they went through in the wood kilns, and I like to think their uniquity compliments that in the people who engage and use them. I’m not picky about what kind of spirit these vessels house - though my personal bias is for bourbon. To be picky would negate my interest in the variety of both spirits and the people whose tastes go this way or that. Whether you fill it with whiskey to share with a friend, or keep it as a bedside water bottle to quench your midnight thirst, the real point is: which one is the right one for you?