Marcia Massa leaves nothing to chance. The tender attention she gives to her craft is evident in the way she makes and presents her artwork. Like a collection of exquisite artifacts, one has the impression that every piece has been treated with utmost deliberation, even reverence. Whether seen alone or in a series, the artist intends each element to be unambiguous in its uniqueness. It is the simplified contours of the forms and the clarity of the compositions as a whole that allow the individual objects to announce themselves with an understated but sure eloquence.
Methodically arranged in clusters or organized linearly, the formality with which the pieces are displayed conjures up the image of ceremonial performance or ritual. The recurring shape of bowls in her recent work, taken together with the materials she prefers, unfired clay and wood for example, evokes the image of a Japanese tea ceremony. The aesthetic of wabi-sabi — the awareness of transience through the contemplation of weathered surfaces and hand-shaped objects
— is alluded to throughout her work. We see it in the ways she brings together organic and inorganic form, the natural and the constructed, and perhaps above all, in her nuanced understanding of texture and surface.
Massa’s art reminds us that our knowledge of the world is bound to our perceptual relationship to it, and that we may develop this understanding through discrete, but profound encounters with unassuming objects. Her art willfully recreates primal phenomenological experiences that shape our consciousness and inner lives, particularly those that suggest fundamental qualities like inside and outside, roundness, and smallness. As Gaston Bachelard has written on the notion of the miniature, the artist’s small-scaled works enchant us because we imagine a quiet monumentality locked within them. Massa’s small forms draw us close and because of this we welcome them as invitations to intimacy.
Anna Carlevaris, March 2012