It’s Ok to Not Be OK - New Work by Scott Alario in Mother, Mother, Ocean at Kristen Lorello Gallery

 
Handful of Finds, 6.5 x 4.75 x 1”

By JUDD SCHIFFMAN January 15th, 2026

For the past seven years, I have watched Scott Alario pour his blood, sweat and tears into a new body of work that has been slowly burning, fusing together into a series of profound images embedded onto ceramic slabs layered with glaze requiring multiple kiln firings. In our shared college ceramics studio, Alario has been undaunted as he taught himself how to work with clay, mix his own glaze, and integrate ceramics into a photographic process. Alario has learned the scientific and unforgiving rules of the craft and promptly broken them in service of his artistic vision. 

When I first met the artist, my daughter had just been born, and I found the familial content of his work incredibly moving. His black-and-white imagery was a window into my soul’s wish for the future of my family. I felt his care and compassion for his children and his partner of more than 20 years, the artist Marguerite Keyes. After viewing several bodies of his work and getting to know Alario over meals and time in the studio together, I have understood that he makes his art out of a necessity to touch deeply the most tender parts of himself. He fearlessly approaches his practice out of this space of love and generously shares it with the people around him. In many ways this mirrors how I have witnessed the artist living his life: seeking to help his friends, most of whom are dedicated artists like himself, to realize their vision.

The Waves Rose Up to Greet Me, 6 x 4.75 x 1”

The way that Alario unforgivingly approaches the creation of his photographic ceramic slabs is uncomfortable to watch. He is not attached to the outcome in a way that most studio potters strive to be. He puts things in the kiln and if they end up broken, cracked, or with pools of glaze running over onto the kiln shelf, he deems them successful and workable. I have never seen Alario disappointed when unloading a kiln, regardless of the damage incurred. Rather than failure, he sees a process unfolding and understands that success must include surprise. This relates to his experience as an analog photographer. With a finite amount of film, clicking the shutter open and closed could yield an infinite number of results, and one must surrender to that mystery. In the dedication to the practice, and through amassing thousands of images, there surely is always some gold. This was a realization to me recently when Alario and I were talking in the studio and he mentioned that his preferred yield for his ceramic slabs is a “two out of 10 success rate.”

This process is incredibly inspiring, and the labored over, colorful, and mottled, pools of glaze created after several firings speak to the trial and error of his practice and the potential of finding perfection in each moment, even with its flaws. As Alario’s recent musical release poetically emphasizes, “it’s ok to not be ok.” Alario’s musical practice, a separate endeavor, finds somber notes stretched out far and wide enough to be uplifting. I see this heaviness in his visual work as well; panel after panel of figures busy in the sand, searching, seeking life in the waters that speak to a post-dystopian moment, and at the same time fading into the starry universe. And in all the quietness, it’s there: the potential for love, the promise of well-being, finally.

Indeed, in this most recent body of work, this perfection is depicted through the love of his partner, muse, and often collaborator, the prolific and skilled artist Marguerite Keyes. Decal images of Keyes and the Alario-Keyes children are fired on to the glazed ceramic slab in a final firing, showing figures often submerged in water or investigating the natural world. Mixed with the figures, the viewer finds craters and ambient speckles in the unevenly glazed surface. The thick and craggy slabs mimic geology and show the artist's family embedded there as if their true shadows are upon the earth’s crust.

Catch and Release, 12.5 x 9.25 x .75”

Mother, Mother Ocean is generous as it provides the viewer a new way of knowing both ceramic objects and digital images. As Betty Woodman redefined our understanding of what a vessel could be by collapsing vase and teapot forms onto wall-mounted slabs, Alario raises digital images from the dead by integrating them onto blemished, rocky surfaces. This makes the digital memories of our experiences tactile and tangible. In Alario’s new work, the form becomes the image, the image becomes the form, and we all understand ourselves a little better because of it.

Alario has taken an arduous path towards making an image that invites viewers to see photography, ceramic processes, kin, and themselves in a new light. The remarkable, phenomenal, and bizarre surfaces could never be ascertained on a digital screen, and they could never find resolution as a printed photograph. Scott Alario’s mottled, earthy ceramic slabs with human figures in the natural world can only be understood as fully alive. 

January 17-March 14,2026 at Kristen Lorello Gallery