The University of Arkansas at Little Rock will open the exhibit, “Ghosts of a Dead Flame,” on Oct. 3.

The new exhibit by John Shea, professor of ceramics at UA Little Rock, will run from Oct. 3-28 in the Ann Maners and Alex Pappas Gallery in the Windgate Center of Art and Design. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

The exhibit features abstract geometric ceramic sculptures that focus on perceptions of metaphor. A metaphor is an abstract form of communication where two different ideas or meanings are coupled, but those ideas and meanings are understood through shared language and culture. However, metaphors shared across cultures and language groups are often hard to understand and can get lost in translation.

The abstract ceramic forms in “Ghost of a Dead Flame” represent the artist physically and visually working out how two different ideas or meanings – the soft forms combined with the angular forms – come together to create singular, understood objects or ideas.

“The work is a reflection of my own personal interest in the way that abstraction acts as both an indicator of an individual as well as a kind of collective meaning that coalesces around random matter,” Shea said. “The way it both is and isn’t something recognizable at the same time.”

Shea holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He has worked as a resident artist at the University of Montevallo and an artist for Bullseye Glass and Mudshark Studios in Portland, Oregon.

The UA Little Rock Art Gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday or by appointment. For more information, contact 501-916-5104 or email Nathan Larson, interim gallery director, at nglarson@ualr.edu.