Smooth Vast Body of Water explores the potential of materiality as an interpreter between the tactile and intangible forms of expression. Featuring the works of ceramicist Olivia Cognet, glass artist John Hogan, and wood sculptor Casey McCafferty, the display brings together three artists who cite the ocean—its physical qualities, as well as its metaphoric potency—as a source of inspiration. Smooth Vast Body of Water examines how explorations of movement result in static manifestations of materiality—sculptures, furniture pieces, bas reliefs. Conceptualized to consider the artist’s practices holistically, the exhibition regards the featured works as waves emerging from the swells of creative pursuit. The result is a survey of the shapes these waves can take, whether sharply contoured, a foamy abstraction, or meditative undulations of stillness.

Olivia Cognet’s ceramic murals can be read cartographically, as if mapping the artist’s own journey from Nice to Los Angeles, leaping over one ocean to be near another. Architectural in nature, the pieces integrate together the aesthetic signatures—the naturalistic lines of the French Riviera’s Art-Deco flourish and the laid-back modernism of L.A.—into bas reliefs reminiscent of a Constructivist tradition. These pieces also challenge the material’s habitual decorative applications, as well as the formal outlines of what we think of as a “mural,” blurring the boundary between graphic art, painting, and sculpture. Alongside the murals, Cognet will present three Totem sculptures, as well as a large, labyrinthine ceramic chandelier.

John Hogan, whose masterful manipulations of glass echo the properties of water, will present a series of thirty new sculptures. Created with exquisite precision, the pieces direct light as it moves through them: two halves of a sphere, are intentionally misaligned to reveal an otherwise clear form’s capability for opacity, dark tints and reflective finishes obstruct the light’s movement to create contrasting perceptions of shallowness and depth, inhabiting the fragile placidity of a still surface on a body water, prone to disruption at any minute.

Casey McCafferty, known for creating pieces that defy the natural characteristics of wood, will present two new versions of his acclaimed Pericles chairs, several unique sculpted side tables, a wall screen, and a desk. Additionally, for the first time at The Future Perfect, McCafferty will show a series of sculptures and totemic works.

Experience Smooth Vast Body of Water in our New York gallery through October 22.