SANTA FE, NM.- Bringing together five artists who explore the sculptural possibilities of black, or the absence of color, SHADOW examines the shape of darkness in the field of contemporary ceramics.

Cary Esser is Chair of Ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work focuses on the parfleche, a dried-hide Native American form she reinterprets with powerful and intense black ceramic surfaces.

New work by Del Harrow, Associate Professor at Colorado State University, is a confluence of form, material and process using volumetric shapes with both manual and mechanized production methods.

Los Angeles based artist Ben Jackel, a graduate of the University of Colorado, uses the force of darkness to exaggerated effect with his oversize sculptures of protective armor.

Jami Porter Lara maintains her studio in Albuquerque and uses a millennia-old ceramics technique indigenous to the Chihuahuan desert, creating contemporary sculptures inspired by the most ubiquitous vessel of our time: the plastic bottle.

Arkansas-based artist Mathew McConnell works with tablet-size tiles with fine details and compositional strategies created with bone charcoal and graphite.