Artist Statement
My work exhibits an appreciation of craft and skill rooted in a love of the object and its permanence. My personal art is augmented by a fascination with the abnormal, macabre, and grotesque. My cache of figures, vessels, and talismans revolve around the potential to represent an archetype, a personification, a trope, or a deity. I am generating a pantheon of personal myths displaying visual cues that act as hubs, overlapping with existing cultures to grant familiarity and a means of access.
I’m interested in walking the line between the familiar and the unknown, between welcoming universality and uncanny individuality. By providing mere scraps of hauntingly familiar information, I activate an existing link to the viewers’ minds and then leave a trail of bread-crumbs to bring them into my own macabre world. Working in true to life scale helps to open those links of engagement.
I explore the beauty of the human form, a phrase that proves extremely telling and problematic. I focus on the masculine presenting figure because it is one that I embody, desire, and understand. Both my work and I emerged from a culture where beauty is marked as feminine. Toxic masculinity vilifies beauty, not only assaulting and alienating over half the world’s population, but creating damaging limits for itself. With the assumed binary of gender removed; attributes, roles, and interactions are opened and can be experienced by anyone. I am crafting an uncanny realm where men inspire men, men are allowed to love men, and men victimize only other men. This curious world of dark objects allows the viewer to embrace new viewpoints free of the limits of an assumed gender binary.
Artist Bio
Born in the UK to American parents, Gerald Kaplan had a nomadic upbringing. He completed a B.S. in Art Education from The Pennsylvania State University. He then took up a position teaching ceramics outside of Savannah, Georgia. While there, he earned his M.Ed. in Gifted & Talented Education from Converse College. Gerald then returned to Pennsylvania where he currently teaches ceramics at The Pennsylvania College of Technology. He earned his M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Wilson College.
