Post-Glass artists : Who are they? *

Most of us who work with glass know that the "do not touch hot glass" phrase is a golden rule. Post-glass artists do not. Most of us have a basic common sense that eliminates the need for announcements such as, Warning: glass is hot! Post -glass artists do not. The works featured in the proposed exhibition will show that common sense is (thankfully) over-rated and that there are individuals who challenge what seems like a common rule to change the notions and perceptions of working in glass.

There are people who think it is perfectly practical to gather hot sugar around a pipe instead of glass and eat the resultant work. There are people who have used reflective contact lenses which do not clarify but preclude their own vision and instead, act as a mirror for the person standing at front. There are people who play music to hot glass as it cools.... We applaud the unpredictable ways in which these artists open our minds up to possibility.

A post-glass artist or Glass guerilla is what happens when people who either are bewilderingly unable or desire not to cope with obvious, well-established, perfectly reasonable techniques and methods laid out for them by time and history and tradition, come together in a post-modern world; a post-modern world of which ubiquitous new media is an integral part.

An artist who makes an elaborate glass object is a post-glass artist when she desires only to show its photoexposed print. Or is able to pass off as a glass object, that which is not. As is an artist who projects moving images onto large blocks of ice, only to watch them - and the image - melt away, just like the dissipation of heat in glass at the end of a pipe. As is a person who contaminates glass with flour and eggs from baking recipes to create bread-like objects, only to grow mold on them. The integrity of the work in many cases, is evident best in responsive environments and preserved through time-based media.

Post-glass artists envision and carry out schemes that an average person can tell are either a bad idea or has nothing to do with glass itself. They contrive, usually unwittingly, to eliminate themselves from traditional channels of exhibition and collection of glass works. This is done in such an innovative, idiosyncratic or extraordinary manner, that their action ensures our attention, curiosity and support. The unusual methods, processes and ways of thinking in which these artists explore their ideas, qualifies them as a post-glass artist or glass guerilla.

And the exhibition that will open in Corning NY in June 2009 will present recent works by such artists.


* this blog entry emulates (in style) the definition of the Darwin award winners.