SAN MARCOS — For the next two months, the Boehm Art Gallery will be home to an eclectic collection of ceramic pieces submitted by 14 acclaimed artists from around the nation. The gallery held an open house for the exhibit — its first-ever ceramic invitational exhibit — Feb. 9.

“Most of these people are very well-known,” said Sasha Reidstein, the gallery’s curator. “Some were inspirations to me when I was a student so it was an honor to introduce myself and invite them to the exhibit.”

The exhibit is titled From Dust to Decadence. Megumi Naitoh, an assistant professor at Emmanuel College in Boston, is a pioneer in the field between silk screen and ceramics. Her series of digital portraits on ceramic feature a trio of oddly blurred mosaics.

According to Naitoh, the works show how mosaics, a medium which was once used

by the Greek and Romans to

portray the natural world,

has now become an instru-

ment for censoring, protecting a person’s identity or hiding obscenity.

Richard Burkett, a 20-year ceramics professor at San Diego State, attended the open house. His pieces in the exhibit include a riddled copper vessel backed with a torrent of negative phrases including “lies,” “deception” and “fabrication.”

“My work is part of a series that appeals to some of the political situations we’ve faced in the past few years,” Burkett said. “If artists don’t speak up, we’re not doing our part. Art is not just about beauty. It’s about being alive and being human.”

Also in attendance was artist Scott Chatenever of Santa Barbara, whose ceramic works are informed by the natural world and its natural order.

“Instead of finding a natural object and trying to abstract it, I try to pay

attention to natural processes, how things grow, reproduce, interact with their own environment, and try to duplicate that process in my work,” Chatenever said.

The end product is indeed something very rooted in nature.

A viewer from Carlsbad might see sea shells in one of his pieces, whereas the work might recall a pine cone for someone from Aspen or a desert cactus for someone from Santa Fe, N.M.

“Part of what interests me is that it illustrates how possessive reality is, how constructed it is from visual cues and our own personal cues,” Chatenever said.

Reidstein hopes the exhibit will be a real eye-opener.

“People often have a very limited perspective of what ceramics is,” Reidstein said. “I was looking for artists who are working in contemporary approaches to the material. People speaking from very personal and modern ways.”

The exhibit is free and open to the public through April 4. For more information, call (760) 744-1150, ext. 2304.