Collaborative mixed-media sculpture by glass professors at Indiana university gallery through Septem

Cortney Boyd’s work entitled “Grandma’s Sewing Machine” is part of the artist’s “Recollections” series, with household objects rendered in ghostly glass.

The New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Southern Indiana, just opened an exhibition of work by two young glass professors that continues through September 30th, 2012. Entitled “Solace in the Commonplace,” the collaborative show features objects remade in glass to force viewers to reconsider everyday household furnishings such as jars, irons, and frying pans by incorporating Surreal elements or presenting them as totemic objects for meditation on the American experience. The individual work of Cortney Boyd, currently acting head of the glass department at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Jennifer Halvorson, an assistant professor at Ball State University, shares in an awareness of the power present in artifacts of quintessential American domestic life when remade as nonfunctional sculptural objects that catch and transmit light, ghosts of domesticity animated perhaps by the yearnings of homemakers who use them. Their collaboration seems like a perfect match for their shared aesthetic and appreciation for the poignancy of memories and the power of objects to trigger them.

Jennifer Halvorson, Purified Beginnings, 2011. Jelly jars, cutlery, sterilizing rack. H 12 1/2, W 14 1/2, D 12 in.

The artists worked together to populate the domestic landscapes with objects that relate to their individual practices. In a joint artist statement, Boyd and Halvorson write: “Skillets, jars, chairs, and aged picture frames are items from our individual pasts, brought into the present to form a commonplace for a greater audience. These recollections of fleeting moments are manifested in select items taken from the past and transformed to represent conflicting notions of comfort and longing.”

Boyd received her MFA in glass from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois, in 2008 and a BA in Studio Art from Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska, in 2001. Halvorson received her MFA in glass from Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, in 2011 and her BFA in glass and metal from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, in 2007.

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