Close to Home

This series, Close to Home, represents both an evolution of Platner’s work and a celebration of the very medium he’s long studied: light. Historically, Platner has harnessed light as a means to photograph, building his own ceramic cameras and transmuting light through them. In Close to Home, Platner now presents a collection of hand-sculpted ceramic lamps, once again wielding the transformative power of light to illuminate precious spaces and faces. Platner constructs each vessel from clay gathered from places near to his heart. Platner forms each ceramic from the earth of places that feel like home—from the brook behind his home studio upstate to the Maine tributaries and Malibu’s iconic coastlines where Jack spent his childhood. In a full circle moment, Jack began his ceramics practice nearly a decade ago in this very exhibition space, 892 Lorimer Street, right around the corner from his Greenpoint residence.