Michelle laxalt and jiha moon

The less we say about it the better

August 12 - October 7, 2023

Olympia is pleased to present The Less We Say About It The Better, an exhibition of ceramic works made in collaboration by Michelle Laxalt and Jiha Moon. Created in the joyful spirit of exchange in Moon’s studio in Atlanta, Georgia, the work embraces curiosity, intuition, trust, and delights in what can be uncovered through play and chance. 

Michelle Laxalt and Jiha Moon first met through the Atlanta art community seven years ago. Upon discovering Laxalt’s fleshy sculptures reminiscent of abstracted body parts, Moon expressed a desire to “tattoo them” with her distinctive illustrations. After a few prototypes, the two artists realized the creative potential of working collaboratively—and the opportunity to break away from the typical solitude of a fine art practice. They began an artistic relationship that saw them make collaborative works over the following years. 

With seven months to prepare a whole new body of work for their first exhibition at Olympia, their foundation of admiration for each others’ practices fostered the momentum needed to experiment with and learn from the other’s approach to form, glazing, and imagery. They quickly noticed that the nature of the collaboration had by now evolved from the way they worked together in the past. Instead of a more careful and step by step approach between the two, the artists discovered a new way of working that was immediate, direct, and simultaneous. Suddenly, every stage involved their equal participation where forms were built together, glazed together, and refired together. 

Gemini Vine, the first work created in this series, pulls motifs from both artists' toolkits that mirror each other – Laxalt’s anatomical descriptors, Moon’s vessels and linework – becoming a hybrid between body and object. Howl honors both artists' glazing techniques, invoking a visceral understanding of the two artists' clay languages. Menina is a playful reference to the child figure in Diego Velázquez’s famous Las Meninas, a painting deemed one of the most historically important for its realism and illusion, and whose smallest subject the two artists were particularly drawn to. 

Alongside the collaborative works are works created by the two artists individually. Their engagement with the other continued even then, with each artist “conversing” with the other through what was learned and memories of what was seen or experienced first hand, applying these lessons unto their own practices – a residual collaboration from the times working side by side. 

Michelle Laxalt is a multidisciplinary artist working in ceramics, textiles, and on paper. She holds an MFA from Georgia State University and BFA from the University of Nevada, Reno (her hometown). Her abstract, biomorphic work is inspired by the notion that our bodies, like those of the animals and plants we share this planet with, are vulnerable vessels that bloom, transform, and perish. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and has been an artist-in-residence at the Hambidge Center and Vermont Studio Center. Laxalt resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is a Resident Studio Artist at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center. This fall, she will join Morehouse College as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art.

Jiha Moon is from DaeGu, South Korea and currently lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. Moon’s gestural paintings, ceramic sculpture, and installation explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She says, “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” She is taking cues from wide ranges of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, and labels of products from all over the place. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify yet stay in a familiar zone.  Moon's work has been acquired by museums around the country including The Asia Society, The High Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Renwick Gallery, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  She is recipient of Guggenheim award and Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painter and Sculptor’s award, and her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most everyone’s mad here,” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum, has toured more than 15 museums around the country. 

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