Toledo Museum of Art invites visitors to experience “Play Time” with glass and other media

“Play Time,” an interactive exhibit opening on May 22, 2015, at the Toledo Museum of Art, promises to be a participatory art playground for museum-goers. The event is based on the idea that a sense of "play" is an important element of everyday life and helps maintain good health (the event is sponsored by a health organization). Depending on the material, the projects will vary in the amount of viewer participation, and will include everything from a climbable net to a giant rubber ball. For glass artist Kim Harty's Glass Mountain project, which involves layering hot strands of molten glass over itself to create a complex single structure, it will be less of an opportunity for hands-on involvement by the general public, but more of a spectacle or performance. For the project, which will begin on Friday, May 22, and continue over the Memorial Day weekend, Harty intends to interact with the audience in a different wayto create her own unique corner of “play.” 

While Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam’s Harmonic Motion is a multisensory crocheted net of pendulum forms for everyone to climb on, and Kurt Perschke’s RedBall Project is an inflated red ball that passersby can bounce up against, Harty’s project will function through an audience watching her take hot, dripping glass from a furnace in a performance that will yield built-up networks of thin glass stringers, which create, ultimately, a final “structure.” The final product will likely resemble something similar to her Lattice Mountain series -- a gossamer landscape of intermingling glass strings she completed in 2012 during a residency at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Studio.

“When the audience is watching the piece being made, they are really watching the artist play and think through the material,” Harty said in an email exchange with the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet. Since the work will accumulate and unfold on its own over the course of multiple days, there is also dedication required on the part of the observer. “It’s not like watching a YouTube video – the viewer has to be invested to experience the piece’s transformation over time.”

Through the performance piece, there is the hope that the observer will go through the journey of the artist, to become as immersed as she is. The “play” is becoming absorbed in her creative discoveries.

“The piece itself is all about reacting to the material," says Harty. "There’s no specific set of rules on how to make it. The forms in the piece are consistent and yet totally chaotic.”

As an artist, Harty wants to expand the kind of forms that the glass medium is set in. Her "lattice" technique stems from her drive to study motion in glass, specifically "capturing" it.  She referenced Jackson Pollock's "action painting" and drip canvases in her original proposal for her artist-in-residency in Toledo -- the lines that captured the body's physical movements. A "line," she concludes, is a point that "travels through both time and space."

"Glass is particularly compelling in its potential to capture liveness. It is a material that freezes in motion and appears exactly as if it was fluid," the artist says

After completion, Glass Mountain will be left up for the rest of the summer to see how much it can withstand outdoor elements.

“It might crumble in a week or it might change slowly over the course of the summer – it is an experiment to see what happens," says Harty. "The public won’t be able to physically interact with the sculpture, but seeing such a large and fragile sculpture outdoors, can provoke viewer to think about the boundaries of the material.”