Inconclusive conversations

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Johnathan Hopp
Galleries
the work presented by ceramic designer Johnathan Hopp, is first and foremost a collaboration with Garo Sandrouni, an artisan potter specializing in the art of traditional, hand painted Armenian ceramics. Hence the work merges two distinct formal approaches – that practiced by Hopp, who works with advanced pottery techniques, and that of Snadrouni’s, who adheres to the Armenian tradition of hand painted, convoluted embellishments.
Hopp, as part of an ongoing formal research he conducts, created a series of vessels based on deconstruction and reassembling of selected modernist precedents. The vessels, of white clay, where then passed to Sandrouni, who added traditional embellishments typically found on Armenian tiles. Their collaboration highlights issues related to intercultural power relations and to the dynamics between tradition and innovation. Hence the series, which pertains to contemporary design just as it does to an established tradition, suggest a hybrid mixture of the kind that brings about a sum that is greater than its parts.
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