Jesse Small
Jesse Small is best known for his steel and ceramic interpretations of war machines, weapons, and equipment. Creatively manipulated to deprive them of their function, Small’s bombers, jeeps, tires, and helmets, operate simultaneously as antiwar statements and compelling aesthetic objects.
Childhood conversations with his grandfather, who served in World War II and Korea, prompted Small’s interest in the military. The grandfather’s vivid war stories instilled in Small both a fear of and fascination with war. Channeling those feelings into art, Small for his first solo exhibition crafted a series of toylike clay and metal war vehicles based on various military prototypes, simultaneously whimsical and menacing.
For Checkpoint, his memorable contribution to the 2000 Avenue of the Arts exhibition in downtown Kansas City, Small parked on the sidewalk a battered old United Nations–style jeep, its body panels laser-cut into decorative openwork designs. “They’re feminine, light, lacy, open,” said Small of the decorations. “The vehicle itself is rugged, masculine, scary.” Nearby, Small placed on the pavement several seven-foot-long steel plates cut into the silhouettes of Stealth bombers. He explained the concept in terms of a simple dichotomy: “In function those steel plates heal the street, but the form is a destructive machine that makes holes in the street.”
At the 2000 Charlotte Street Awards exhibition, Small presented smaller steel silhouettes of Stealth bombers, their surfaces opened into a decorative pattern of arcs, spokes, and continental outlines derived from the UN logo, and similarly perforated UN helmets. Curator James Martin wrote that the decorative skill displayed in these artworks signified “sophistication, while the subject of war embodies barbarism.”
Small’s military-themed art took on added resonance in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the fall 2004 Contemplating War exhibition at Johnson County Community College, Small presented Hard Candy, a wall-mounted installation of more than one hundred candy-color porcelain helmets, embellished with graffiti or encrusted with flowerlike decorations, and a group of similarly encrusted porcelain tires. Small explained the titular reference to candy in terms of war’s function as an “opiate,” while the tires, resembling artifacts dredged from the sea, he imagined as memorials from a future without war. “Army tires need to be stopped. Their rolling brings no good to the world.”
Departing from military themes, Small’s 2005 MFA thesis show featured colorful ceramic slabs based on architectural cornices and ceramic sculptures merging fragmented tires with the shapes of pedestaled urns, ribbons, and other objects. A year-long residency in China (2005–06) generated new creations, including a whimsical series of colorfully decorated porcelain Talk Bubbles and another of porcelain Ghosts, the former based on the ubiquitous cartoon speech balloon, the latter on characters from the popular Pac-Man video game. Small made these works in part to breach the language barrier he felt while in China, noting, “I could communicate with my work—things like the ghost and the talk bubble … are kind of like a universal language.”
—David Cateforis
