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In recent earthenware vessels and a wall installation of matte glazed porcelain vases, Jill Bonovitz says more with less. Never an artist of ornament or elaboration, Bonovitz at one time incorporated lines of poetry and layered colors in works of simple form and subtle surface. Now, her interest in ceramics as poetic and spiritual expression has been further refined to a formal mantra in large, open, velvety bowls. A more playful but equally reductive sensibility is expressed in antic grouping of white cylinders.

In the center of the gallery, seven pools of pale color float above discreet gray pedestals. Each is a flattened vessel about two feet in diameter rising a generous handsbreadth from a small but not precarious foot. Tints of terra sigilata bloom softly: jades, grays and powdery earth colors. Each work is a round monochrome painting, a self-contained terrain in which pooling, rippling densities of fluid slip, calligraphic smears in relief and scratches on the surface suggest a crypto-narrative, almost a geologic history.

Each piece appears weightless, cloudlike, timeless: metaphors for being or the world perhaps. Simultaneously, each is an utterly mundane, not-quite regular, not-quite-irregular object with weight, density and texture–an unpretentious, undisguised product of the artist’s hand.

A second body of work consist of 53 unglazed porcelain cylinders formally installed in small familial rows on wall-mounted shelves. The stark silhouettes are uniform in size with glossy, almost vitrified surfaces.

Pronounced spiraling bulges in Bonovitz’s small freely-thrown vases confirm a connection to Japanese teabowls, but these vessels maintain a staid verticality balanced on pearl-like feet, like chess pieces or pre-Columbian figurines.

The thinness and irregularity of the thrown forms suggest that the artis has strectched the clay to the limits of stability. This, like the delicacy of the added coil elements, appears to comment on the fragility and arbitrariness of the human condition, but obliquely, without anguish. Like Bonovitz’s luminous blows, these objects imply something more vast and profound than human concerns.