News
March 2024 at SomoS Arts, Berlin
In the "Root Fragments" solo exhibition, Chicago-based American interdisciplinary mosaic artist Karen Ami presents a group of ceramic sculptures, drawings, and mosaic artworks created during her residency at SomoS Arts in Berlin in the winter of 2024. This exhibition emerges from Ami's deep engagement with family brokenness, displacement, and reunion within the historical framing of a post-Holocaust diasporic community.
In her evocative fusion of personal narrative within broader historical contexts, Karen Ami scrutinizes the fissures left by history, using art as a vehicle for overcoming these disruptions. "Root Fragments" beckons viewers into a realm of reflection, where the process of reassembling fragments serves as an allegory for insight and endurance amidst adversity.
Ami examines the broken pieces of her family history here- her grandmothers were murdered in a German concentration camp, and her mother, a young child, was hidden in Berlin throughout the war. Her mother survived and found refuge in the USA, where she was forced to give Karen up for adoption. In her work, she seeks “not so much to mend but to reconfigure” the fragmented past into a form of metaphysical reconciliation. Her work represents a matriarchal exploration of female lineage, tracing the genealogical thread from herself through all her mothers and grandmothers.
Her painstaking and time-consuming mosaic technique repositions crafting from a traditionally domestic activity to a potent feminist act of addressing trauma across generations. Ami's mosaics can be viewed as a form of "Trauerarbeit"—the “work of mourning” traditionally conducted through crafting—that merges the tactile with the cerebral, a meditative act of remembrance and healing in which slow-paced, mindful creation serves as a conduit for processing grief. Never merely serving as a window into another world but rather consistently foregrounding their own fragile physicality in an act of defamiliarization, the mosaic reliefs toy with our perception in their ambiguous fluctuation between the two and three-dimensional, relying on an inspired mix of ceramic collage and assemblage.
Imbuing cosmic expansiveness with a sense of urgency and exuberance that evokes the Chicago Imagists and Underground Comics of the likes of Robert Crumb, their dynamic scenes are nevertheless rendered in a restrained palette in which grays and blacks prevail. Also, Ami’s studies in Meso-American and Pre-Columbian sculpture resonate in her raw depictions of the bodily. Furthermore, Karen Ami's art connects with the “Confrontational Crafting” of the Feminist Art Movement that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. This movement, which often subversively employed Craft and Ceramics, championed the ethos that "The personal is political." Indeed, this maxim elegantly encapsulates Ami’s artistic vision, revealing a nuanced interplay between the intimate and the communal, the individual narrative and the collective historical consciousness. In Ami's work, this blend manifests as a masterful synthesis, underscoring the indelible link between the microcosm of individual experience and the macrocosm of universal truths.
Delving further back into art-historical lineage, Karen Ami’s nuanced practice of auto-iconoclasm also situates her within the broader narrative of the Art of Destruction. This artistic stance serves as a potent metaphor for the self-destructive tendencies of twentieth-century society, as exemplified by a diverse array of artists, including Gustav Metzger, Yves Klein, Shozo Shimamoto, Lucio Fontana, William S Burroughs, and the avant-garde collective Throbbing Gristle. These artists, in their visceral response to the traumas of the Holocaust, the Atomic Bomb, and the Cold War, engaged in acts of ripping, burning, tearing, cutting up, puncturing, and otherwise violently disrupting their materials.
Ami’s contribution to this genealogy is marked by a critical divergence—her art navigates through destruction toward a horizon of repair. This distinguishing element of her practice contrasts with the often unilaterally negative articulations of her predominantly male predecessors in the Destructive Art movement. Through her work, Ami embodies a process that not only acknowledges the inevitability of fragmentation and disarray but also champions the possibility of healing and reconciliation, positing the act of mending as an equally powerful, if not more profound, response to societal and personal cataclysms.
The making of Ami’s mosaics follows a highly symbolic, even alchemical process that “reimagines and pulverizes the past to create a new space for repair, enabling acceptance and growth,” as the artist describes it. In an almost ritualistic act of creative destruction and resurrection, her works are assembled into mortar from the detritus of broken or cut ceramic tablets that she painted, carved, and incised with drawings, markings, hermetic private symbologies, and poetry that encapsulate fragments of memory. This recombination is always fragmentary and multilayered by design, never literal; providing hints but leaving the full story up to our individual imagination. Moreover, her clay works engage in a self-referential conversation about their material essence—earth—and its connotations with the body, fertility, reproduction, and the cyclical nature of life and death. This interplay resonates with various cultural, religious, and scientific narratives that contemplate the origin of life from clay.
Central to the “Root Fragments” exhibition stands Ami's bold reclamation of her German-Jewish heritage. Utilizing German earth to craft her ceramics, Ami confronts and transforms the Jewish experience rooted in that very soil, defying and subverting the "Blood and Soil" ideology's xenophobic geodeterministic rhetoric that established a direct relationship between land, race, climate, and history. Ami’s magical act of artistic defiance not only reclaims her family's legacy from the shadows of tragedy but also repositions it as a beacon of resilience and renewal.
In the exhibition, the intimate clay sculptures and mosaics are accompanied by a series of energetic graphic black and white drawings. Appreciative of the immediacy and fluidity of the medium, Ami uses the drawings as templates for her mosaics. In the drawings, mildly psychedelic, with abstracted, cosmic, sometimes almost theosophical flourishes, Ami develops private mythologies that follow their own hidden logic. Referring to them as “notes,” serving to keep the artist bound to her original intention, they are eventually transferred to ceramic plaques, fired, and then smashed to be used in her mosaics. In this pre-fragmented state, they give us a glimpse of Ami’s flowing, confident drawing style.
In a second group of paper works, Ami again plays with perception and self-referentiality. In an act of artistic self-cannibalization, she combines cut-up photos of the finished mosaics with shards of ink drawings to create collages with intriguing Trompe-l'œil effects. Retaining the unframed state of the drawings enhances their enigmatic presence, allowing their raw intimacy and tactile qualities to speak directly to the viewer. As one navigates through the exhibition space, the works engage on multiple levels: initially, from a distance, their bold, graphic essence commands attention, symbol-like in its starkness. Drawing nearer, a dynamic interplay between the audacious and the intricate emerges, revealing a complex network of textures and lines. It is in this close, personal communion with the drawings that a richly detailed universe unfolds, beckoning the observer into a meditative exploration of its dense web of references and interwoven stories.
Poignant but not without joy, at least on the level of creation, “Root Fragments” bears witness, underscoring that despite the deep scars of history, the essence of Ami's heritage remains vibrant, resilient, rhizomatic. Her exhibition vividly illustrates the enduring impact of historical events on present lives, openly exploring themes of loss and healing. By tenderly cultivating the roots of her lineage, Ami nourishes her ancestral legacy up into the light, allowing it to flourish anew.
2024:
SOMOS ARTS BERLIN
Artist in Residence February/ March 2024
I have aspired to live and work in Berlin- specifically to respond to my own deeply personal issues of familial brokenness and repair. My specific multidisciplinary art methodology of mosaic is a means to address dis/connections, dis/associations, and proximity through fragments of broken memory - captured through drawn and inscribed tesserae. My deconstructed images and language both reimagine and pulverize the past to create a new space for repair- enabling acceptance and growth. My practiced based research makes literal and physical connections to contemporary art practices, such as collage and assemblage - processes which may use deconstruction and problem solving to address subjects such as climate change, immigration, inequality, and posttraumatic memory.
I will be participating in the Artists in Residence Program at SomoS Berlin, where I will creating new work and presenting it in a solo exhibition, opening March 26, Kottbusser Damm 95 Berlin Germany. I am completely gobsmacked that also my family and friends are traveling from around the world to join me here in Berlin for the show. The exhibition will travel to ARC Gallery, Chicago, for a September 2024 opening.
I am also leading my workshop, Embracing the Broken, in collaboration with SomoS Arts Berlin and DOMO, the German Organization for Mosaic Artists, February 24-25. For those interested in the workshop at The Chicago Mosaic School, please check the schedule for the all the amazing opportunities there.
August 2021:
After 30+ years of artistic exploration and practice, I am in a place where I want to push myself, as both artist, collaborator and scholar - to go to new places of discovery and understanding. I am fortunate to have found ways to survive and thrive as a creative person. I have always been driven by my curiosity and desire to seek out solutions and answers, which led me to start The Chicago Mosaic School and push my work into new uncomfortable places.
I have been yearning to take another leap with my practice and gain a deeper understanding of the language of art. I welcome the opportunity to become richer in my work, in my writing, research and my connection with those outside of my present world.
This year of ‘covidness’ has been both horrible and wonderful. I am choosing to see the opportunities created rather than those that have been lost. I felt like it is the right time for me to delve into study and inquiry again. I am thrilled to announce I have been accepted into a PhD program in Creative Studies- a a program the combines both research and art practice. This has been a longtime dream and I am excited to see where I can go next with my art practice, my writing , and my life.
Karen Ami, 2021
Press
Edgeville Buzz 2017
Selected Publications.
Mosaique Magazine
Grout Magazine
Chicago Sun Times, February 2020
Chicago Tribune, January 2019
Chicago Magazine July 2018
Chicago Woman Magazine February 2018
Chicago Times September 2017
New Art Examiner
Groutline