Viewing: New Work

Martin Blank pictured with one of the two glass artworks that animate a city park in lower Manhattan.

Friday January 27, 2017 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Martin Blank on the installation of his NYC public-art project

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, New Work, News, Public Art

Martin Blank has called the concept of "flow" the unifying theme of the last 25 years of his career as an artist, and this is readily apparent in his latest public art commission. Set to be unveiled in Spring 2017 in the small city park next to the recently opened Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown, Blank has created two working fountains in which the multiple glass elements mediate the falling water, and reference it in its cascading forms that appear like splashing water, or eddies. Contrasting with the restrained "New Classical" style of the building's architect, Robert A. M. Stern, Blank's exuberant work animates and enlivens the exterior space with its celebration of gravity and the shared fluidity of water and glass. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet spoke to Blank after installation was complete, but before the water would be turned back on, about the project that he calls "the hardest installation he's done in his career."

Dafna Kaffeman. Wolf 01, 2010. Glass, aluminum, and silicon. courtesy: the artist and lorch + seidel contemporary, berlin.

Tuesday January 24, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

MassArt gallery unveils first glass exhibit in 30-year history as major Boston arts venue

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, Museums, New Work, News, Opening

On Monday evening, when the Bakalar & Paine Galleries at Massachusetts College of Art and Design unveiled its new exhibition, "VITREOUS BODIES: Assembled Visions in Glass," it marked the first time glass art was displayed at this prime visual arts venue in the Fenway-Kenmore area of Boston, a cultural destination. Bringing together works by 13 multidisciplinary artists including Dan Clayman, who had spent the Fall semester at MassArt as a visiting professor, the show also includes work by an international group made up of Kanik Chung, Petah Coyne, Mona Hatoum, Timothy Horn, Michael Joo, Dafna Kaffeman, Jacob Kassay, Maya Lin, Lucy and Jorge Orta, Arlene Shechet, Thaddeus Wolfe, and Rob Wynne. Also debuting on Monday, but at a different location on the MassArt campus was a second work by Clayman, his largest installation to date. (Disclosure: Clayman serves as an advisor for the Robert M. Minkoff Academic Symposium at UrbanGlass, which is organized by GLASS magazine.)

The full overview of the Rainfield work with a human figure to indicate the massive 60-foot-long scale of the work.

Monday January 23, 2017 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Dan Clayman’s largest installation to date debuts at MassArt

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Etsy-find, New Work, News, Public Art

More than 10,000 individual glass droplets have been strung up in the atrium of the Design and Media Center at Boston's MassArt, the culmination of a project by the college's visiting professor Dan Clayman that is being unveiled this evening. The work is entitled Rainfield, and was constructed during "Structured Light," an interdisciplinary course with 18 MassArt students who worked alongside the Providence-based artist to realize this piece that measures 60-feet long. The completed project represents the largest-scale work Clayman has completed, the latest in his assemblage works that aggregate multiple glass elements to create a massive structure, as he did in his 2014 work Dispersion at Brown University. The installation will remain on view through summer,

West Branch of the Susquehanna, 2006. Hot worked, slumped, and etched glass on steel. H 48, W 30, D 3 in. collection: connie and jamie egan

Tuesday October 18, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

OPENING: Meditations on nature in Kathleen Mulcahy’s rich museum retrospective in Pennsylvania

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, New Work, Opening

While artist Kathleen Mulcahy was canoeing on the west branch of the Susquehanna River over a decade ago, a sudden storm came out of nowhere, leaving her no way to escape from the furious pelting rain. The river was too wide, and the waters too rapid. “We were moving into it, and there was nothing I could do but submit," she told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet in a telephone interview. "And in that moment of submission, of letting go, I put my hand in the water. And after that moment, once I let go, we went right through the storm; and on the other side of it was clear skies and fresh air and beauty like I had never really experienced, from everything — my skin, the way things smelled, the air, everything was beautiful. I remember putting my hand in the water and saying, ‘what will my new work look like because of this?’” The answer arrived in a dream a few months later. "[Upon waking], I quickly grabbed a pencil and sketched this little tiny sketch of the image that I saw.” Mulcahy's first drop piece came soon after, titled West Branch of the Susquehanna (2006), which will be featured in her upcoming exhibition “Opposites Attract: Kathleen Mulcahy and Sylvester Damianos,” at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art opening on November 5, 2016, and running through February 2017.

Brett Swenson, Standards of Measurement, 1 Liter (detail), 2016. Erlenmeyer flask, obsidian, heat, borosilicate glass shelf. H 10, W 10, D 9 inches. courtesy: norte maar.

Friday October 7, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

SEEN: Independent exhibition in Brooklyn celebrates visions of glass worlds by a new generation

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, Seen

"Paracosm" is a technical term for an imaginary world. The most famous examples are literary, like J.R.R. Tolkein's Middle Earth or C.S. Lewis's Narnia; but in the visual arts, narrative works are often set in manufactured worlds. In an independently organized exhibition in Brooklyn, New York, the work of six experimental artists has been organized into “Paracosm: new worlds in glass,” which showcases the capacity of glass art to provide a transporting experience in a wide range of works, all with a conceptual foundation. Brooklyn’s Norte Maar, a nonprofit focused on “connecting emerging artistic communities and uniting cultural forces to foster artistic expression and raise the imaginative energy in us all,” is the setting for this fanciful exhibition, which runs through October 23, 2016.

Between Fragment and Whole: Ellipse, 2016. Glass. H 13 3/4, W 21 5/8, D 21 5/8 in. courtesy: heller gallery, new york

Tuesday October 4, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Speaking Volumes: A conversation with Jeannet Iskandar on her Heller opening tomorrow

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, New Work, Opening

Danish artist Jeannet Iskandar makes things complicated, but you wouldn't know that at first glance. From across the room, her ongoing series of deceptively simple spheres appear to be minimalist objects with perfect symmetry. But upon closer examination the cool exteriors give way to an internal world of engrossing intricacy, complex assemblages of individual blown glass elements deformed by gravity and glassblowing tools, and then further transformed by repeated heating in a kiln. Iskandar was once employed by fellow Dane Tobias Mohl, and his influence shows in her appreciation of patterning, which is formed in her work by the selection of individual elements and the jigsaw puzzle of putting them together. Splashes of subdued color — inky blues and somber blacks —punctuate her newest work, which brings new elliptical forms and a larger scale than Iskandar's earlier objects. On the eve of her solo exhibition at New York City's Heller Gallery, the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet spoke by phone with Iskandar from her studio in the seaside city of Ebeltoft, which is an outpost of international glass in Denmark.

Charlotte Potter, Bovidae Goat. Hand-sculpted glass, wood, metal, plastic, fabric. H 16, W 11, D 7 1/2 in. courtesy: walker contemporary.

Friday September 30, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

Man and nature collide in Vermont contemporary gallery group show featuring Charlotte Potter

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, New Work

The complex relationship between the human and the natural worlds is rich territory for an art gallery set in the town of Waitsfield, Vermont, with its long history of forestry and agriculture. Through mid-October, art dealer Stephanie Walker has turned over her Walker Contemporary gallery space to an exhibition entitled “What Have We Done?”, which examines artists “grappling with the often precarious human versus nature relationship,” according to the gallery’s website. Among the five artists with work on display is the native-born Charlotte Potter, who grew up in Waitsfield before embarking on a notable career as a multi-media artist with a focus on glass. Holding a 2010 MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Potter is currently the studio manager/program director of the Chrysler Museum of Art’s Glass Studio, in Norfolk, Virginia, and her evolving artwork is represented by New York City's Heller Gallery. Potter's glass deer and elk antlers have actually been incubating in the artist’s mind and studio practice since 2008, and are recontextualized by showcasing them alongside paintings and drawings in which, as the gallery puts it, humans’ “meddling interference in the natural order of things…takes center stage”

Cappy Thompson, Dandelion, 2013. Blown and engraved glass. H 13 1/4, W 13 1/3, D 6 1/2 in. courtesy: traver gallery, seattle

Thursday September 22, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Drawing with Light: A conversation with Cappy Thompson on her new engraved work

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, New Work, News

Cappy Thompson, known for her folk-art-inspired reverse paintings on glass that explore contemporary themes, has been experimenting with engraving for the past few years. It's been a departure for Thompson, who is an expert grisaille painter, a process where a first-layer of enamel in gray tones is followed by second firing of brightly colored enamels, to create figurative works. Though grisaille involves the removal of an initial coat of gray color, most of Thompson's work was based on layering enamels onto glass to create densely colored surfaces. But etching into glass had been on Thompson's mind since a 1990 trip to then-Czechoslovakia, during which she was intrigued by acid etching using a resist. "It looked like ice that had been melted," Thompson remembers. The dangers of working with highly corrosive and toxic etching acids kept her from ever pursuing this technique at home. However, while she was teaching at Corning in 2012 with master engraver Max Erlacher, she became entranced by the possibilities of wheel-cutting glass. Her friend and fellow artist Charlie Parriott helped her acquire a lathe from the Czech Republic, and she was able to learn from April Surgent and two Czech master engravers during a Pilchuck residency. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet recently caught up with Thompson for a telephone interview as she prepared an artist's talk at Traver Gallery scheduled for this evening to talk about this bold new direction for the work in her current exhibition "Bright Blue Light."

Laura Donefer's Blood Basket, is one of the works referencing the legacy of Canadian painter Tom Thomson, in this case, his environmental awareness.

Tuesday September 13, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Conversation with curator of glass exhibition in response to top Canadian painter

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, Museums, New Work

Curator Christian Bernard Singer, formerly of the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, has held the position of senior curator at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in West Owen Sound, Ontario, since October 2015. He recently spoke with the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet about his current exhibition entitled "With a Destiny," which features work by Canadian glass artists Laura Donefer, Susan Edgerley, and Karina Guevin. Painter Tom Thomson (1877 – 1917) is arguably Canada's most renown artist, and he ushered in a new, raw style of landscape painting at the turn of the 20th century that continues to resonate through Canadian contemporary art today. The art gallery that bears his name houses one of the largest collections of Thomson's paintings, but its mission also includes connecting the artist's trail-blazing work to the latest contemporary art in a variety of media. The glass exhibition on view through September 18, 2016, finds a connection to Thomson's work in a frank exploration of the natural landscape, as well as meditations on the idea of destiny, according to the show's curator Singer.

Ione Thorkelsson, Fledgelings, 2010 photo: clay and glass gallery

Friday September 9, 2016 | by Ana Donefer-Hickie

OPENING: Canadian gallery features new sculpture exploring familiarity made strange

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, Opening

From September 18 to December 31, 2016, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery will feature dual solo exhibitions by artists Lou Lynn and Ione Thorkelsson, both of him explore similar themes. Well-established glass casters that exhibit widely in Canadian galleries, Lynn and Thorkelsson's exhibitions will each display a combination of new and previously exhibited glass works that explore the strangeness in familiar things and question aspects of our present social reality. Lou Lynne's exhibit entitled "COMMON/unCOMMON" is comprised of works from her "utensil" and "fastener" series, works that re-interpret the familiar beauty of historical tools and household objects. Ione Thorkelsson, known for her unorthodox casting techniques, presents "A Natural History of Utopias," a grouping of sculptural castings that explore the imperfections of the ideals we project onto the natural world.