NEW YORK, NY.- Marc Straus is presenting Hewn in Blue, an exhibition of new sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Josh Cloud. The title speaks to the making of a self: who we were, are, or will be, shaped by what happens to us and by our own hand.

Cloud builds in ceramic, stacking rounded, organic forms and layering glaze until they read as faces, figures, or something closer to plants and coral. The works are lighthearted, even whimsical, yet they carry material that is not: grief, loss, the weight of history. Floodplain reads as a feline face with pots stacked above it. Some can be read as masks: faces made solid, held between the self and the world.

Cloud’s figures begin in a sketchbook as cartoonish self-portraits, then are inflated into rounded, exaggerated volumes that explore identity, queerness, and intimacy: what we present, what we protect, and what we let be seen. In Ecdysis, a figure hides behind a rock, peeking out. Against inherited ideas of masculinity, a role handed down and worn, they offer openness as a form of strength, holding the absurdity of being alive alongside the hardship.

The blue came first, out of instinct and chance. Cloud mixed most of the glazes from scratch. Blue is also the blues of the 1960s, the music he turns to for solace and for its example of what it costs to bare one’s soul in public, and the color of a year spent working through diagnosed depression and considerable loss. His grandmother passed away while the works were underway, altering the tone of his final pieces and the palette he used to glaze them.

The works continue Cloud’s Sunken Bust series, in which he rebuilt figurative sculpture in a shape language of his own, recalling the humorous self-portrait busts of Robert Arneson. His attention has since shifted to headpieces and amalgams that stand in for a figure’s inner workings, drawing on Black and African sculptural traditions and on the theatrics and joy of live drag, where the self is built and worn in public. Many of the figures are inspired by face jugs made by enslaved African Americans in South Carolina’s Edgefield District in the nineteenth century. Cloud places himself among makers for whom care for material is inseparable from meaning, naming Thaddeus Mosley, Alison Saar, Akinsanya Kambon, and Wangechi Mutu. Earlier still stands George Ohr, the self-named “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” whose glazed vessels, each unlike the last, were as invented as the persona behind them.

Four wall-mounted works, Artifact (Interlude), pair ceramic stones, worked to pass for rock, with metal rods that bend like arms, antennae, or a weighted pendulum. They are as playful as the figures and far sparer, a made stone given personality.

If we are shaped by everything we experience, from grief and joy to play and heartbreak, how much of that shaping is done to us, and how much do we do ourselves?