Andréa Keys Ceramics

Andréa Keys is not exactly a Pittsburgh artist, but she is from Athens, OH, which is within driving distance, and she's a featured LEAP artist for July at the Society for Contemporary Craft (2100 Smallman St). As the SfCC says "Keys investigates individual identity, behavior and action in her large-scale ceramic installations."

These sculptures are a little larger than life size, and with so much detail, they're just so awesome to look at. I love that they are more caricatured humans with great poses and expressions. There are some nice detail shots on Andréa's site. Andréa describes her work:

The sculptures that I make are driven by a desire to investigate how an individual's peresonal history affects their identity, behaviors, and actions. I am especially interested in intergenerational trauma and how a person's past, particularly a past that has been interrupted by a traumatic event such as war, can influence patterned behaviors that are passed through the family. I focus on characters that take their cues from Western ideals of a collective identity. I am utilizing images, patterns and symbols found in specific notions of Western identity and psychology to create my characters, yet I am displaying them in environments that are unfamiliar. The element of fantasy that is thus created shows how the past and the present, dream and reality, conscious and unconscious, familiar and unfamiliar can exist together in an environment that is uncanny, much like the way subconscious memories of a traumatic event can be very much alive in our conscious actions.

Link