That Was Now, Placed, Livingston, MT, 2025
On View July 5th–September 27th
A group exhibition featuring:
Alayna Rasile, Andy Woll, Bari Ziperstein, Ben Medansky, Brad Eberhard, Carmen D’Apollonio, Carol Horst, Cherlyn Wilcox, Cody Hoyt, Colton Rothwell, Chelsie's, Dan John Anderson, Dante Gambardella, Darcy Bartoletti, Eric Mast, Erica Mahinay, Eva Nielsen, Giselle Hicks, In-Session, Grayson Fair, James Cherry, Jason Koharik, Jeremy Liebman, Jill Elizabeth Gower, Jody Baral, Kelsie Rudolph, Kohshin Finley, Liz Oliver, Martha Tuttle, Matt Chambers, Maura Wright, Michael Rey, Nice Condo, Pare, Niki Ford, Ravenhill Studio, Sage Vaughn, Soojin Choi, Studio Ahead, Taidgh O’Neill, Trey Hill, Unearthen, and Yehrim Lee.
Phrases like “same as it ever was,” “change is the only constant,” and “this too shall pass” reflect society’s complex relationship with time, highlighting how our attention shapes what we value—in art, commerce, and spirit. That Was Now explores themes of novelty, nostalgia, and timelessness across a diverse group of 30+ artists and designers spanning over half a century of practice.
Through a series of vignettes, and in the tradition of the Stein salon’s blend of high art and domestic environment, objects and artworks are arranged to evoke the textures of time. The exhibition’s conversational layout can be viewed as a whole or in parts, allowing the viewer to fluctuate between detailed observation and expansive meditation—all within the limits of a 12′×20′ room. The intention is for the viewer to feel the shifting flow of time that comes with focusing and unfocusing attention.
The convergence of these creative acts reveals what Leonard Koren refers as the “essential being-ness of the arrangement,” [Leonard Koren, Arranging Things] fostering a heightened awareness of one’s environment that can, at times, suspend time and fully immerse us in the present moment.
Capsule Collection, Maison Truvaille Galerie, Los Angeles, CA, 2024.
Photography by Nio Vardan.
The color palette and materials in this collection symbolize the places that have shaped Ben's creative originality—Arizona, where he grew up, and Los Angeles, his current home. Terracotta and rocky, earthy, warm hues evoke the promise of an unknown desert breeze. Muted, slightly dusty but full-of-life deep greens nod to the local LA flora, while pops of robust, contrasting colors imbue the pieces with vitality.
– Artem Korolev
Our capsule collection with Ben is our mutual journey into the unknown—for him, incarnating his work in sculptural pieces, making them those lucky found objects; and for me, creating a space where I can now showcase all the finds that thrill me, hoping they will move and touch the viewers too.
– Erick Garcia, Founder of Maison Truvaille
Ferns & Freeways, Presented by Bianca Chen, Los Angeles, CA, 2023.
The towering freeways that carve through my neighborhood of Frogtown, alongside the lush greenery of the LA River, embody the intricate balance of our interconnected world, and serve as a constant source of inspiration for my work. I am enamored with navigation systems and topography, as they allow me to immerse myself in the contours of urban landscapes from a bird's eye perspective. Each ceramic painting and vessel in the collection embodies the essence of the symbiotic relationship between nature and human-made infrastructure—a dance that is at once beautiful and haunting. With careful attention to glazes and the incorporation of sand, I have sought to evoke the texture and hues of foliage while paying homage to the rough, industrial beauty of asphalt-blanketed freeways. The result is a series of works that offer a meditative reflection of the delicate equilibrium we strive to maintain in our world.
Matches Fashion x Balenciaga x Ben Medansky
Frieze, Los Angeles, CA, 2022.
A collaboration with SIZED LTD. and Matches Fashion for the Los Angeles edition of Frieze at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Featuring 9 artists from VESSEL, a show curated by SIZED director Alexander May.
Mental, Harvey Preston Gallery, Aspen, CO, 2021.
A two-person exhibition featuring works by LA based ceramic artist Ben Medansky and Argentinian painter Pablo Martin at Harvey Preston Gallery in Aspen, CO. The discourse of the show is based on the connection between abstract thought and the exclusively human ability of imagining new worlds.
Material / Memory / Myth, Presented by Jeff Lincoln and Nicole Timonier, Los Angeles, CA, 2021.
A strand of beads, familiar forms stacked and balanced, questioning scale in relation to the body.
Stacks, Materializations, The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2018.
A group exhibition that finds pleasure and meaning in materiality.
"Stacks" a monumental whole made up of many parts—that utilizes repeated forms from base to top. Historically, totems have had a symbolic dimension to them; this abstract work, without inherent symbology, istead draws attention to the intricacy of its craftsmanship—it was made by hand, and reflects the artist’s careful, measured approach.
– Gerard O'Brien
Stories, MELTING POINT: Movements in Contemporary Clay, Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, 2018.
“Stories” Terracotta - Medansky has always been drawn to the aesthetics and themes of technology and media. In stories, he explores the ramifications of social media on communication and community building. To create the piece, Medansky projected communication threads from his social media platforms onto wet clay slabs and inscribed them into the clay. He repeated this process until the layers of words and images became indistinguishable, Then fired the slabs and stained them with blue underglaze. Arranged as a religious triptych, he is referencing early forms of record keeping that incised marks into clay tablets, as well as storytelling through religious iconography. The works format also shows the similarities between the intense devotion of social media followers and followers of religion. The use of blue is to seduce an audience and gain their attention, as well as representing the blue screen we construct our fantasies upon.
– Andres Payan Estrada
Making It Work: Production by Design, The American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA, 2018.
Curated by Jo Lauria.
A complementary exhibition to Discovering Saar Ceramics. It extends the model of the artist/entrepreneur practiced at mid-20th century by Richard Saar into our current culture. Showcased are design collections created by potters pursuing careers in both camps of fine art and industrial art. The featured artists/founders have established ceramic studios and originated elegantly designed production lines of simple, contemporary forms that function beautifully with everyday use. Enabled by social media, online selling platforms, and designer showrooms, these ceramists offer their uniquely handcrafted dinner, serving, and housewares design lines to the global market. Thoughtfully handmade in their Los Angeles studios, these artists are reinventing the business of small art potteries and expanding the aesthetic possibilities of ceramic production. Featured artists: Ana Henton and Mel Keedle of Still Life Ceramics Ben Medansky Nobuhito Nishigawara of W/R/F Lab Peter Sheldon Bari Ziperstein of Bzippy.
The Ashtray Show, Fisher Parrish, Brooklyn, NY, 2018.
The AshtrayShow celebrates another seemingly obsolete object from the mid-century-modern deskscape – now perhaps made relevant again by the legalization of cannabis. Smoking is back envogue and we can all finally start accessorizing again!
Wayfinding Screen, Mess, The Future Perfect, Los Angeles, CA, 2019.
Co-curated by Laura Young and Tom Morris.
An exhibition co-curated by The Future Perfect’s Gallery Director Laura Young and Tom Morris, the London-based design editor, critic and author of “New Wave Clay”, Mess aims to highlight the unleashed sense of creativity that has underpinned ceramics in recent years. The title of the show refers not just to the expressive, painterly nature of contemporary pottery, but also the disarrayed thoughts and radical references that have emboldened the practice of many ceramicists working today. Unconventional techniques, rule-breaking approaches to clay, and a playful aesthetic have created a renewed optimism in the age-old craft.
Recent Acquisitions: New L.A. Design, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Permanent Collection, Los Angeles, CA, 2018.
Bobbye Tigerman, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator
Staci Steinberger, Associate Curator
The four mugs are the premiums of membership in the Medansky Mug Society, an artistic project in which subscribers received four mugs over the course of a year. The black, white, and electric blue color palette and the applied geometric designs are typical of Medansky’s architecture-inspired aesthetic. Mugs became one of Medansky’s specialties when he was commissioned to make custom versions for Los Angeles coffee shops G&B Coffee and Go Get ‘Em Tiger.
His handmade mugs represented an extension of the third wave coffee shop ideal of knowing the source of your goods, and as nondisposable objects made in Los Angeles, they fulfilled a desire to support local production, a local artist, and sustainability concerns. The Medansky Mug Society was created to experiment with a new paradigm for the distribution of his work, which was both high and low—Medansky offered his mugs as limited edition works of art, provocatively claiming high artistic status, but made them available through a subscription model, like magazines or consumer goods. The vase represents a very different side of Medansky’s artistic practice. In addition to functional objects, Medansky also makes clay sculpture and architectural cladding. While nominally a vase, the sculpture-like piece is constructed of the most basic geometric forms. This piece was finished inadvertently in a devastating fire at Medansky’s studio in downtown Los Angeles in 2016, in which nearly all of his work was lost.
The fire “fired” the piece, giving it a distinctive black speckle surface design that could not have been achieved in the kiln. As a result of the fire, Medansky had to find a new studio space and new tools. He opted not to buy a wheel, that mainstay of the ceramist, but instead an extruder in order to shift his focus to geometric sculpture. Since the pre-fire functional production has ended, and he is embarking on a new phase in his career, these pieces represent a completed body of work.
For Further Study, Room 68, Provincetown, MA, 2017.
In this body of work, I drew inspiration from my grandfather’s autobiography—a document that traces both personal memory and larger histories. In his writing, he recounts his time as a scientist and doctor aboard a naval ship at the end of World War II, studying microscopic life through the lens of a microscope. I became captivated by this idea of worlds within worlds—vast narratives contained in tiny forms. Throughout the work, circular forms echo the shape of the microscope’s viewfinder, becoming portals into another dimension—spaces for reflection, both literal and symbolic. Hexagonal patterns appear as well, referencing the six-pointed Star of David as a symbol of our shared Jewish heritage. These shapes weave together themes of science, identity, and memory, speaking to both the wonder and the weight of lineage during a time of global conflict. This series became a way to honor my grandfather’s story, while also expanding it—connecting the personal to the universal through material, form, and symbol.
Fired By The Fire, Lawson-Fenning,
Los Angeles, CA, 2016.
On 23rd July 2016, Ben Medansky’s world stopped.
The artist was on the Westside of L.A. when a friend called to tell him there was a fire in Downtown, not far from his studio. As Medansky drove along the 10 Freeway, from a few miles away he could already see an apocalyptic pall of grey smoke rising over the city. He snapped a photo from his car, and posted it on Instagram.
“Shit. I hope that’s not me,” he wrote.
Even when he arrived at the scene, he did not fully believe that the fire had reached his studio. He posted a video – three racing jets of water from firemen’s ladders across an apricot evening sky –and wrote “My studio might be on fire : (” The next image, showing the open gate and door of his studio, was simply captioned, “This sucks.” Inside, the space was completely black.
Anyone involved in a disaster like this finds themselves in a curiously public position, in which everyone seems to know about the tragedy and is eager to show their support, but which nobody except the victim can truly comprehend. It is a very exposed situation, especially for an artist whose professional life, to a certain extent, is lived in public, and especially for one such as Medansky who engages with a huge and invisible audience through social media. The next day, he broadcast a Facebook Live video, ostensibly because he needed to document the damage for insurance purposes and he had run out of space on his phone for new photos. The video was viewed 11,000 times, and led to supporters setting up a GoFundMe site to help his business recover. Medansky’s fire may have become a de facto communal event, but it was up to him alone to draw conclusions from the fire, and to find a path forward.
He ceased production on certain bodies of work and refuses to remake most of the pieces that he lost. As with so many fires, there were uncanny coincidences – such as the ‘Up in Smoke’ studioparty he held the night before – that led some to suggest the disaster was pre-ordained. Medansky roundly rejects such superstition. He believes that nothing happens for a reason, although everything happens as it should. The destruction of his workspace, equipment and artwork has forced him to begin again, and created a space in which a new world can be built.
“If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire,” writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
Fire, in his view, is antithetical to life. Life is crawling, life is incremental, life progresses at the clicking pace of the clock and the calendar. Fire, on the other hand, is a whooshing irruption in time. It is a reversal, a hole torn in space, a system crash and a memory loss.
– Jonathan Griffin, Author of On Fire
So out of the ashes came a whole new body of work, Fired by the Fire, exhibited at Los Angeles showroom Lawson-Fenning four months after the fire. Elegantly displayed on podia at the showroom were blackened, charcoal-y fragments of new works -- tail fins of missiles, parts of engines, plates whose glaze had bubbled into a resin-y tar like finish that suggested everyone had taken up smoking again.
“They were a post-apocalypse version of works that already appeared to have drawn formal inspiration from nuclear age technology. The whole display was an extreme example of wabi-sabi, the Japanese notion of beauty in imperfection. And it sold.Fired by the Fire was also an extreme example of making lemonade out of lemons.”
– Frances Anderton, Design and Architecture, KCRW
Rising Talent in Design Award, Maison & Object Americas, Miami, FL, 2016.
Ben created a collection of sculptural vessels for a week long exhibition where he was awarded as a Rising Talent in design in America.
Site Specific: LA, Curated by Sight Unseen, Austere, Los Angeles, CA, 2015.
Ben was chosen to be a part of the Sight Unseen OFFSITE show at Austere Gallery in downtown LA. The pieces showcased included a small collection of Ikebana vessels alongside his distinctive, monochromatic architecturally influenced structures.
We Came in Peace, Persephone’s, Eastown, Hollywood, CA, 2016.
Photography by Sight Unseen.
In a show produced by WE CAME IN PEACE and their temporal, site-specific plant shop Persephone’s, this collection of vessels was paired with exotic flora for an out-of-the-ordinary installation and Valentine's shopping experience.
Gridscape, Space 15 Twenty, Los Angeles, CA, 2014.
Ben, along with fellow artists and friends Bradley Duncan and Lauren Spencer King presented GRIDSCAPE, shown at Space 15 Twenty. The exhibition explores minerals and cuboid crystal pyrite along with grids, radial symmetry seen in ceramic vessel, large scale peg works, and vertically erect cacti.