The Light in Your Eyes // Renata Cassiano Alvarez  // Anthony Sonnenberg

Our Love is a Shady Garden // Yanira Vissepó

Sheet Cake Gallery is pleased to present two new exhibitions in October, both opening October 12 from 5 - 7:30 PM. The Light in Your Eyes features Renata Cassiano Alvarez (Veracruz, Mexico/Fayetteville, AR) and Anthony Sonnenberg (Fayetteville, AR) in the front gallery space,while Our Love is a Shady Garden featuring Yanira Vissepó (Nashville, TN) takes place in the second gallery space. Cassiano Alvarez and Sonnenberg were both included in Sheet Cake’s inaugural exhibition, Welcome In; this is the first exhibition for Vissepó at Sheet Cake.

Cassiano Alvarez and Sonnenberg are ceramic sculptors who share a deep belief in the power of objects that communicate significant amounts of information about history, power, and status. In their respective practices, there is an intentional decision to work through complex ideas of identity through abstraction, which provides for greater flexibility of thought for both the artist and the viewer. They both see their sculptures as being reborn through the process of construction and firing, bringing disparate components together that carry their own histories but become new beings with a life of their own. 

Cassiano Alvarez is concerned with the tension between ephemerality and endurance. A lifelong fascination with archeology is a significant influence in her practice, connected to her archeologist parents and her own early professional experience in restoration at an archeology museum. Archeological artifacts carry information about daily activities, religious rituals, and cultural traditions, but they require study and interpretation, answering some questions while generating others. While she incorporates restoration techniques in her practice, Cassiano Alvarez pushes against conventions of the field by highlighting the cracks and imperfections inherent in the firing process and materials she uses. Her sculptures are witnesses and bearers of time, process, and labor. There is an innate curiosity and embrace of failure and experimentation in their creation, establishing an intimate relationship with the materials that become sentient and feeling in their completed form. Another key influence for Cassiano Alvarez is her Latin American heritage and her personal experiences as a transnational artist living between Mexico and the American South. Bright colors and the use of industrial tile are direct influences of Mexican architecture that when combined with the archeological references create energetic objects that feel mysterious and emotive.

Sonnenberg’s embrace of beauty and decoration is both a balm and a rebellion. His ornate sculptures manifest a desire for luxury and grandeur achieved not through wealth or influence but from ingenuity, looking past the surface of found materials, and hard work. He rejects art history and academia’s dismissal of decorative art in the hierarchy of Western art canon. Sonnenberg also reflects on the relationship between beauty and queer culture which, for him, is not just connected to self-expression and love but to survival, where a concern with beauty growing up in a small town in Texas was deemed non-threatening. There is a connection and appreciation as well for the thrifty nature and resourcefulness of early drag culture captured by the cult film Paris is Burning. Heavily influenced by Baroque, Rococo and Victorian art movements, the sculptures take the form of elaborate candelabras, vases, and lamps with rich glazes and luster. Sonnenberg builds in pieces from his extensive collection of found and thrifted tchotchkes, which he sees as adding past lives and histories that are reconstituted and feed the life of the new sculpture. 

Yanira Vissepó blends painting, natural dyes, block printing and collage in her practice which centers around the study and celebration of the ecosystems between her birthplace in Puerto Rico and adopted home in Tennessee. The naturally dramatic landscape of Puerto Rico’s tropical rainforest and saturated colors in native plant life merge with the striking change of seasons seen in Tennessee, creating lush and vibrant paintings. Vissepó uses organic materials and natural pigments, drawing from Japanese printmaking traditions. Both the materials and imagery speak to her long-time interest in herbalism and holistic healing that began as an important means of self-care before manifesting in her artistic practice. Generous swaths of blue, green and red are created using a stain painting method that add depth and texture to the surface, with collaged floral and plant images delicately stitched onto the canvas or fabric.