Stephen Braun, Addiction, rakued clay

High Gallery
Sept 11–Dec 30, 2009

Stephen Braun’s sculpted ceramic figures meet the viewer head on. Made of rakued clay in muted browns and greens, these 20- to 30-inch figures with eerily calm mask-like faces are dressed in ties and suits, decorated with crucifixes and jet planes, light bulbs and suns. They stand on blood-red globes or amid piles of broken earthenware, asking us: What’s next?

Anthropologist by training, peripatetic by nature, Stephen uses clay to shatter cultural preconceptions. Born in Quincy, Illinois in 1959, he studied at the University of Montana-Missoula with ceramic revolutionary Rudy Autio and mixed-media sculptor Ken Little. Stephen works out of Whitefish, Montana.