Exhibiting Artists: Beccy Feather

Ultra Shiny Infomercial:

Exhibiting Artists: Beccy Feather

Ultra Shiny (2009)
Glass, stickers, advertising campaign

‘Ultra Shiny’ is a new and exciting product tag from
MondoNew Technologies that captializes on the perception
of glass in the eyes of the neophyte. Stickers claiming ‘Ultra Shinyness’
are placed onto glass products which are otherwise second rate.
The project, using now-ubiquitous forms of product
advertsiing to explore glass through the lens of both promise
and misdirection, encompasses: Glassware including a range of
stickers with marketing slogans.
Marketing materials: ‘Ultra Shiny’ business cards, t-shirts, baseball
caps, rubber stamps, car door magnets, Evidence of product placement
in the marketplace, i.e. www.etsy.com, www.ebay.com, etc and a
Wikipedia page devoted to Ultra Shiny.
Trade show attendance. A clever advertising campaign.

Exhibiting Artists: Anna Mlasowsky

Interaction And Action(2009)
Blown glass, hardware, participant (16.5'x16.4'x variable height)

The proposed project aims to blur the “I make, you watch” line between an
artist and a viewer using the common non-verbal language of making.
A room is installed with simple blown glass pieces, sticking out of the floor
and hanging on the wall. The objects are moveable; they may be taken out of
/ into or relocated within the room to change the installation.

Exhibiting Artists: Anna Mlasowsky

Pain, Written in Blood

Glass pen, glass bag and rubber tubes with needle, written letter, video
Possibly performance

The performance will be submitted as a video alongwith the materials used
to make the performance: Glass pen, glass bag and rubber tubes with needle,
written letter.
The video features a person, seated and writing with her own blood. Blood
from the left arm will be taken with a needle. The blood runs throuh rubber
tubes to a glass bloodbag, were it gets thinned out and transfered through
another tube into a glass pen the person is holding in her right hand, writing.

Exhibiting Artists: Angus Powers

Objects Empowered; Glasses of Action/Context (working title, 2009)
Glass, printed text, digital print / video

The proposed work comprises a series of simple drinking cups, each
conceptually “activated” by a controlled environment and context of
production that will empower each object in the final presentation.
egs. * Downhill Glassblowing---production of a cup while rolling on mobile
glass bench (image 1) * Tandem Glassblowing---production of 2 glass cups
at once on a single double-ended blowpipe (image 2) * Long Distance
Glassblowing--- production of a cup via a 300 foot rubber hose with blow
partner on a cell phone * Retail Redefined Glassblowing---a glass cup made
from melted down Wal-Mart drinking glasses * Floating Glassblowing---a
glass cup made while in a canoe.
The environments and contexts will range from humorous to serious, and be
both fun and thoughtful. In presentation, each cup is coupled with descriptive
reference to the context and a large digital print.

Exhibiting Artists: Andrew Bearnot

Mutable Cup (2007)
Video

A rubber goblet performs feats unknown to her glass counterpart, and
makes visible the action of touch.
It is an attempt to reanimate the glass.

Exhibiting Artists: Andrew Bearnot

Ballet Verrerie (Glassworks Ballet), Premiere Performance November 2007
2 framed, digital prints (18x27 inches)

The Ballet Verrerie is a new dance company that pays homage to the glass
craftsman by developing and performing dances inspired by the sinuous
and graceful movements of the maestro.
The Ballet Verrerie reveals the logic and grace of these movements, but also
to explore their illogical fascination and allure.

Exhibiting Artists: Amy Ruffert

Title N/A (2006)
Large format digital photographs, glass

This body of work explores inorganic (and sometimes organic) objects
reconceived as natural specimens in a state of melting, dripping, or bleeding. In
a world of material abundance, how would we change our lives if the objects
around us experienced feeling? How would we view things if they were
living—or possibly dying?

Exhibiting Artists: Alexander Rosenberg

To Fly
Glass, flies, audio

The project is concerned with an amateur approach to flight. (i.e to achieving
flight by catching thousands of flies and tying them to the artist’s body using
a special flight suit.)
This section of the project includes the collection of simplified fly catchers
and the sound of the volume of flies that would fill them

Artist: Alexander Rosenberg

Drawing 2 - Original footage with the animation over it

Artist: Alexander Rosenberg

Drawing 2 (2008)
Glass bowls, digital projections, steel armature

Motion-tracking software and a particle generator plot the line made by
glass on the end of the pipe in the process of making a low bowl. (Image 1).
The animated line is projected into the sand-blasted interior of the bowl
created in the video. The bowl is suspended in a steel armature (image 2).
Image 3 shows the various “drawings” that appear on the inside of the bowl.
The original footage with the animation over it (video stillas inset image)is
shown in the room as well, somewhat removed from the abstracted version.

Artist: Aimee Sones

Untitled Proposal(2009) Glass, sugar, candy, packing

Digital elevation model (DEM) for the Corning, NY area are used to make
miniature souvenir landscapes in clear hard candy and a limited edition in
glass, for the both low and high end consumer. To be sold in a variety of
locations ranging from candy stores and gifts shops to galleries.
Possibilites :
Connors Market Street Mercantile @ 16 East Market Street
The School House Country Store @ 22 East Market Street
Market Street Coffee & Tea @ 61 East Market Street.

The End of Studio Glass?

Even before a birth of the term, Post-Glass Art, a New York based writer, William Warmus
stated "the end" of the Studio Glass in 1995.
The following essay is excerpted from "The End?" an essay by William Warmus, which is on his website:
http://www.warmus.us/The%20End%20essay%20Warmus.htm


THE END?

Studio glass has its beginning and end in America, where the present situation offers opportunities in two directions. Looking back, historians have an obligation to write the history of studio glass and establish its key figures, its first wave. Looking to the future, artists have the opportunity to incorporate the technical legacy of studio glass into new narratives.



Studio glass is at a pivotal point in its history. The recognition of established masters including Tom Patti and Dale Chihuly (the alpha and omega of technique and marketing), Richard Marquis and Dan Dailey (our humorists), Paul Stankard and Mark Peiser (pioneering naturalists), Howard Ben Tre, Mary Shaffer and Marvin Lipofsky (all sculptors) and the increasing attention paid to their work by writers, museums and collectors indicates the passing of the era of isolated innovation within the field. First wave work has the fresh, innocent quality typical of profound innovation and when the history of studio glass is written, the period from roughly the founding of the Glass Art Society in 1971 into the late 1980s will be theirs as originators and educators. And as innovators, they became the ones to challenge.



Originally, the concept of the glass artist working alone in the studio made sense as a way of moving beyond the meaningless and unproductive traditions that Harvey Littleton and others sought to escape, as they existed in the confines of the 1950s glass factory, which had become highly commercialized and unresponsive to artist’s needs. This led to a period of intense technical and stylistic innovation as studio glassmakers slowly reinvented the factory concepts of continuous technical experimentation, teamwork, efficient organization of space, refinement through repetition. Now the early masters of studio glass have become the champions of its traditions. The criticism leveled against many of these artists--that they do not change--no longer seems valid as time reveals the diversity of work produced during their careers. Significantly, these pioneering figures may now be seen as justified in consolidating their positions: they almost have a duty to perfect and publish techniques that took decades to refine.



We have perhaps forgotten that studio glass is largely about technique and broadening the definition of the factory: although it began in the United States as a way to get the creative glassmaker out of industry and into a pristine studio, it was also a way to put the artist back in control of techniques and some kind of factory. Today artists like Dale Chihuly and Dan Dailey are the direct heirs to Tiffany and Galle who, in the words of Harvey Littleton, “were trained as artists and had chosen glass, but [who] chose to work within the framework of factories that they founded, factories that were totally under their control so that they made very exciting things”. This is why studio glass begins and ends in America, where glassmakers first felt expelled from industry and where many now control their own homemade factories.



Most art movements last only a generation and the styles grouped together under the term studio glass are not exempt. Exceptional is the fact that new waves of studio glassmakers and collectors often behave as if their world will continue to evolve at the rapid pace set by the early innovators. This leads to the marketing of “innovations” that repeat, sometimes unknowingly, the early successes of the first wave. The terrain of studio glass is only now being charted, its circumference and boundaries measured, our susceptibility to imitations lessened. Criticism of glass exists, but is sporadic and tends to be published in specialized journals. We need forceful criticism as a gauge of originality and corrective to excesses, whether of taste, price, or commercialism. Forget the endlessly distracting quarrels over “Is it Art?” We need critics and historians to engage in the debates from which consensus will emerge about the key artists and objects of the studio glass era, even if some turn out to be industrial designers, some objects made by production studios. And we desperately need critics who will generously champion and defend the individuals they support.



I would venture to suggest that when the history of studio glass is written, significant accomplishments will include the growth of a community, the emergence within this community of innovative approaches to the marketplace, and the cultivation of maximum diversity within the medium itself.



Communities grow from a mixture of common attributes and interest, and I challenge readers to find any art communities that are more unified than the one focused on glass. As the American art scene expanded from the 1960s onward it became increasingly difficult to capture the sense of community shared by earlier groups such as the abstract expressionists, unified by location (New York and the Hamptons), dealers (Peggy Guggenheim), collectors, and critics (Greenberg and Rosenberg). The current art situation mirrors the present political situation in the United States: it is too diverse and factional to be called a community in the traditional sense. But the glass world, the glass ghetto so disparaged in some circles, is not. It has remained a community on the order of the earlier ones that are now disbanded. That is something to celebrate, not dismiss and discourage. If you are an insider and have forgotten the warmth of individual members and the strength of the crowd, or a newcomer and want to see for yourself, visit any of the great gatherings of the clan (the phrase of one prominent critic): the October Pilchuck School benefit auction, the springtime Glass Art Society conferences, the great exhibition and collector reunion at SOFA Chicago every fall.



The market for studio glass matured from roughly 1979-1989, led by legendary dealers, notably Ferdinand Hampson and Douglas Heller, who in many ways took the place of art critics as promoters of the “new glass”. In my mind, the key innovation in this market was the development of a close knit and highly involved community of collectors on a national (not regional) scale, unlike anything in the artworld, who for many reasons found that they enjoyed each other’s company, enjoyed taking glassblowing lessons, founding philanthropic societies to support emerging artists, etc.. Many were couples who collected as a means of enhancing a relationship, and many collectors were successful business people who brought a benignly competitive approach to acquiring studio glass.



Since 1990, stagnation has been evident. Many of the founding collectors have built large, mature collections and consequently are less active. Impersonal forces, primarily discounting and studio sales, drive the nineties market and have taken the lead away from pro-active dealers and collectors: who are the new Hampsons, Hellers and Saxes of the nineties? What are the bold moves, such as opening a gallery in SoHo or energizing a major art museum (Toledo) to renew its support for contemporary glass? There are certainly signs of optimism, as some members of the new generation of studio glassmakers have been able to raise their prices by showing in a fine arts context where prices are traditionally higher. But should we be optimistic that the studio glass community and market is increasingly driven by external forces, and no longer by its own internal momentum, which now seems dissipated?



Art communities are defined more by shared aspirations than shared achievements, which tend to be recognized as individual. As leading figures in studio glass achieve national attention and distance themselves from their origins, the aspirations of the community become diffused and susceptible to sentimentalizing. Now, as younger artists working with studio glass techniques develop stronger roots in the art world, signs of disintegration are only emphasized. Their aspirations lie elsewhere, as may their community ties. This is inevitable: communities are destined to dissolve or evolve. And while the ever present fear in political communities, republican or democratic, is that they will succumb to tyranny, art communities might rightly fear more the effects of neglect and marginalization. The pond may be drying up.



The glassmakers who came after the first wave and matured in the 1980s, as well as those now entering the field, face a daunting situation. Stagnation, exhaustion and lack of direction are words applied in the 1990s not only to studio glass, but to all aspects of life in the United States. The end of the cold war has unmasked the decay of moral values in nations on both sides of the iron curtain. Artists, aware of the changes within society, have documented this corruption. Pathological art, art about the sickness of society, has replaced the avant-garde art in the mainstream. Are we witnessing the desperate end of an era, or a stillborn birth?



Studio glass itself is not stagnant, it is complete. There is an uncanny parallel between the development of studio glass and of glass blowing in ancient Rome. As Donald Harden noticed, in writing for The Glass of the Caesars, “There must have been some experimenting before glass-blowing became accepted and well understood by glassworkers... but ...within twenty or thirty years they proved capable of developing almost all the inflation techniques still present nearly 2,000 years later in the workshops of their modern successors.” I believe the argument can be made that the period of innovation in studio glass, roughly from 1962 through the end of the nineteen eighties, was the most significant period in the history of glass since Roman times.



The significance of studio glass may be its cultivation of and openness to diversity, not in an ethnic sense but in a technical, material one. The preserve of glass is everywhere, not just in the artworld. Sometimes it seems that glassmakers make things for no reason at all except the technical challenge, but in fact studio glassmakers are willing heirs to a long and mixed tradition of craftmakers, artists, souvenir shops, anomalous extra-artistic stuff, stuff so beautiful or unusual or peculiar that glass has become a loose cannon among media: it is unpredictable how any glass object will be appreciated once it is made. The unpredictable beauty inherent in glass means that an extreme surplus of value may at any moment be attached to any object: a factory made souvenir or the damaged 200 inch telescope mirror blank on display at The Corning Glass Center. This suggests that some of the best works in glass are not necessarily magnificent works, but those that inspire magnificently. These may be turned out by many different kinds of studios, and it is the willingness of many to accept this diversity that has kept the community vital.



Will another 2,000 years be required before the word new can again be applied to glass making? The confused and incomplete styles of art we see emerging from glass studios today are indicative of experimental, transitional, rococo and mannerist work that, in moving away from studio glass traditions, has yet to establish its own identity. Some of the best work has simply taken its place in the art world in general and is unrecognizable as studio glass: Christopher Wilmarth, never a studio glassmaker, led the way in this direction.



Despite the success of Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” glass as a material for art has never been comfortable in association with the avant-garde or its pathological successors (even Galle, the sickliest of glassmakers, asserted the vitality of nature through his symbolism). Art glass that imitates the look and actions of the avant-garde appears immature and kitschy or stale and pompous. Maybe glass is too inherently healthy, glassmakers too accepting of diversity, to fully participate in the current art scene. Tiffany and Galle may yet emerge as more central to glass than Duchamp or neo-expressionism.





Perhaps the most promising glassmakers are now renovating venerable glassmaking traditions by producing vessels and figures within a narrative art that has links to traditional storytelling. Maybe the word renovation will come to replace the word deconstruction as a mantra for the nineties. The interest in narration, in narrative art, is significant for renovation: retelling is a means of renewal. Narration promises to be the tool that is added to the “technical” tools developed by studio glassmakers over the last 30-odd years, a tool that is necessary for retrieving lost legacies and for opening up future horizons. As Paul Ricoeur, the essential philosopher of narrative, wrote: “Making and narrating have become the two sides of one process.”



Today, making glass and narrating are the two sides of one process. Yet narrative studio glass should not be weakened by narrowing its definition to a sort of three-dimensional storytelling or by appropriating to itself the roles of painting and sculpture as documentarians of the pathological and the unhealthy. The role of narrative in glass, like the role of telescopes in astronomy, should be nothing less than the humanization of time and space, so that we can make a home in the expanding universe. This project promises to establish for glass a role independent from the other arts.

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.

the building that was an apparition

works by Yagi Lyota

A gramophone record made of ice starts to melt, suggesting that recorded music disappears

by being played. A turntable with record revolves, playing a sigular tone, while being used as potter's wheel to make porcelain, reborn as a music device to change tone to be itself.

Yagi Lyota creates sound pieces, objects and videos, both in installation and interactive works, using a variety of methods. He employs familiar goods, such as books, records or daily items as his subject, then re-reads and re-edits their functions, to humorously suggest other meanings. The record made of ice starts to melt as soon as it starts to play, and its recorded music is instantly lost. One could call it a very imperfect recording medium. Another piece allows us to 

listen directly to the engraved sound ,as vibration, by putting a pencil point on the spinning record groove instead of the needle.  A record disk as a sound object, to record above -sea sounds and undersea sounds on opposing sides of the record, the disc itself representing the water's surface, as an existence which belongs to both worlds; an extremely thin membrane...

original text excerpted from ICC Online: 

http://www.ntticc.or.jp/

Alicia Keys: "I basically drip the cells over the glass and they stick to the surface and they slowly start to grow and spread out...

Artist's skin cell work cultivates concern

There is outrage at a Hobart artist's move to cultivate skin cells for art.

Alicia King has received ethical clearance to use her own cells and those of consenting patients at the Royal Hobart Hospital.

The artwork involves growing skin cells over glass forms, and fixing and dying them before they are added to an art piece.

"I basically drip the cells over the glass and they stick to the surface and they slowly start to grow and spread out until there is a thin membrane," she said.

"It's quite hard to see with the naked eye so I dye it with a tissue culture dye."

It has taken the University of Tasmania's Human Research and Ethics Board six months to approve King's application to use her own cells for the mixed-medium work.

"It's much more clear-cut with ethics if I am using my own," she said.

"There is no issues of consent that are there with animal tissue."

The clearance also means waste tissue from consenting patients at the Royal Hobart Hospital can be used.

But the hospital says it is inappropriate and has refused permission.

An exhibition of the work opens in Melbourne tomorrow.

(ABC News online Aug 16, 2006)

glass grows!

Anyone who knows of or makes work where the pristine, immortal, clinical and casteless associations of glass are transgressed.....Please post links.

We need for glass to grow... and very literally.

"Slow Glass"

A show at Lisa Cooley Fine Art

http://www.lisa-cooley.com

 Slow Glass takes its theme from the titular substance, an invention of scence fiction writer BobShaw described in his novel Light of Other Days(1968). Slow Glass is a transparent material that tremendously slows down the speed of light that passes through it, so that a piece that had looked out

on a picturesque countryside setting, for example, could later be used to provide a view of the pastoral scene from a city apartment window. 

In Shaw's novel, slow glass plays a key role as evidence in a mystery by

 "recording" a criminal act.

Article excerpted from New York Art Beat: http://www.nyartbeat.com/

CALL FOR ENTRIES

Exhibition and catalog (working title): Post-Glass Artists / Glass Guerillas
Exhibition date and location : June 2009, Corning NY
Deadline for submissions : Oct 01, 2008




Description:

Post-glass Artists / Glass Guerillas questions the adequacy of the current definition of a glass artist, its associations and implications, in light of the studio practice of a significant number of emerging artists.

We are looking for works that toy with the idea of “guerilla intervention” in glass practice. For example, the method or production of your work may use the vocabulary and tools of alternative media rather than glass; the final form of work may not be glass. Perhaps, not even an object. Or maybe the object is made of glass but behaves in a remarkably un-glass-like manner. Maybe the outcome of your artistic process or its mode of distribution exceeds the focus of conventional glass art channels(throughsay, street performance).
We seek works whose concepts are unarguably derived from the direct experience of working in the medium of glass and yet, are risk-taking in their approach. They are hard to accept in conventional glass art avenues, challenging to existing discourse and uncomfortable or unfamiliar to encounter. To this end, we also welcome proposals.

To submit:

Please email yukanjali@gmail.com. You may submit upto 3 works/ideas for consideration. Indicate whether work or proposal in the subject line. In the main body of the email, include a brief description (upto 100 words) per submission and why you are interested in submitting (150 words total). For a proposal, send a written description of your project [max. 500words] with up to 3 images [drawings, pictures etc.] that exemplify the project.
Attach image/video/sound files as needed, less than 10MB. Please label the attachments as follows: yourlastname_entrynumber_imagenumber.fileformat (eg. genius_01_03.mov for a movie file sent by Jane Genius in support of submission 1 and image 3 within that submission). Do not forget to list contact information at the bottom of your email to us. Works that are of interest will be posted at http://howisthisglass.blogspot.com/ for open discussion, which you are welcome to join. For more information and questions about this project as it develops, please visit the blog or email us.

LIFE -fluid, invisible, inaudible...

LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible ..."is a collaboration between world-renowned composer/ musician SAKAMOTO Ryuichi and TAKATANI Shiro, core member of the Kyoto-based internationally active art group dumb type.

While the genesis of this piece is in SAKAMOTO Ryuichi's opera "LIFE" (first performed in 1999, for which TAKATANI Shiro the video aspects) as is evident in the title's "fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." it revisits the resources of sound and vision in "LIFE" now,several years later, in this new millenium, for an entirely new deconstruction and evolution of the work. If we say that "LIFE" was an experiment conducted in opera's linear, modern form at the end of the 20th Century, then the installation configuration of "LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible..." must surely be a non-linear, decentralized flow of audio and visuals which the visitors themselves enter to experience.

A grid of 3 x 3 acrylic aquariums, 30cm high and 1.2m square are hung, in a darkened room. Each carries a thin film of water inside. Each has speakers affixed at both ends. Inside of each a fog is artificially created using ultrasonic waves, percolating fluid patterns which hover between transparency and opacity. Imagery transmitted down into these tanks from projectors attached above them--at times synchronizing all aquariums, at times decoupled and seemingly autonomous--shines down through this screen of kinetic patterns woven of water and fog, connecting the imagery while ceaselessly melting, floating endlessly between flows of meaning and meaninglessness, the concrete and the abstract.
The sounds and visions in "LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." including the newly added materials, are divided into categories of 20 and 30, and stored on a computer hard disk. Being run by a random control program, the audio and visual files are called up randomly from this depository, to create an installation which is constantly changing.

"I wanted to distance myself from the curse of time." (SAKAMOTO)
"I wanted the imagery to project completely free of control." (TAKATANI)

In both of their comments we can see their embrace of the emergent potential of the flowing phenomenon that is fog and the randomness of the computer to escape typically linear and conclusively established time and space.
*"LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." was produced as a commissioned work at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), and exhibited from March 10 to May 28 2007 at YCAM to great critical and popular acclaim.
http://rsst.ycam.jp/

original text derived from NTT ICC communication center
http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Exhibition/2007/LIFE_fii/preface.html

Perspectives offered by contemporaries

Museum of Glass Presents Mining Glass (June 16, 2007 - February 3, 2008)

The Museum, in its press release claims," Glass may have been disregarded by twentieth century art as decorative, but today it is not simply a major medium in its own right, it is also one that opens new visions for the artists who are approaching and mining it."

Another excerpt: "Mining Glass is the first major survey to examine how the rich and unparalleled material of glass has expanded beyond its traditional application in decorative and functional art in the early twenty-first century.The installations are organized around eight narratives that act as suggested passages to help viewers see beyond the technical matters associated with the medium.By moving through the themes of artifice, boundaries, desire, enchantment, excess, identity, intersections, and landscape, the exhibition concentrates on the deeper issues that concern artists, allowing the meaning of the work to take precedence over the technique of how it has been executed. The featured artists, none of whom are glass artists, thus present a stunning diversity of approaches to the material to reveal the multiplicity of glass--precious, magical, and mystical, yet common, practical, and functional--while challenging the notion that work in glass is merely pretty."

Question is: "Merely pretty" ??? Heyyyy, what's wrong with pretty?

Question 1: How does our standpoint (in terms of "mining") differ? Is our take but a variation on postmodernist multiculturalism and hybridism? Are we interesting in the fundamental redefinition of glass through artistic practice? Or is it something else?

Image credits:
Jean-Michel Othoniel (French, born 1964), Black Hearts, Red Tears (detail), 2006-2007,
Blown glass and glass beads,
108 x 132 x 4 inches (274 x 335 x 10 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. Photo by Russell Johnson

Bubbles

Glass+New Media=? Brainstorm for a new word

What is glass?

The idea of in-between-ness is inseparable from glass. The material exists at a threshold chemically. It is an amorphous solid or a super-cooled liquid, the debate continues as to which. What is clear though, is that glass exists as a state somewhere in between a liquid and a solid. This means that despite having properties of both liquid and solid, glass is neither. It is too viscous to be a crystalline solid and too cohesive in molecule structure to be a liquid, just as I am too Indian to be Tamil and too regional to be a global citizen.

Glass is matter. It is light. Glass is immortal yet fragile. By virtue of being indetermined at multiple levels, glass lends itself to alchemical and phenomenological transformations. Through my experiments with glass, I realize that it embodies the defining quality of a threshold: it is a dialectic.

Threshold = (to) thresh + (to) hold, thres. hole, thresh. (W)hole.


Image source: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html

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