The Winter 2013 - 14 edition of GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly (#133) hit newsstands and subscriber mailboxes earlier this month. On the cover is Kazushi Nakada's 2005 work De-Fragment from his "Study Period" series. Inside, GLASS editor Andrew Page discusses Nakada's geographic and artistic journey from his native Japan to Europe, where he is currently a senior lecturer at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. For Nakada, who grew up in a family of ceramicists in Japan, the move to glass was a break with his lineage, but one undertaken for his sense of glass as a material with global reach. As he says in the interview: "Ceramics was always a local world. ... I thought that through these glass works, I could connect to the larger world."
The conversation follows Nakada's expanding ideas about art as his intense technical training in the material during his studies at the Tokyo Glass Art institute gave way to a rigorous intellectual study of art at the Royal Academy of Art in London. The result was some of the more interesting conceptual work in glass, frequently engaging the issue of "space" -- our sense of it, and incarnations of both real and imagined space. Using infinity mirrors, Nakada creates illusions of depth but takes it further with stereographic photography of spaces that no longer exist -- recreating volume and atmosphere in the viewers' perceptions of architecture of buildings that have been demolished.
Other features include a highly personal assessment of the late Jiri Harcuba (1926 - 2013) and his immense contribution to glass engraving, written by artist, teacher and curator Marshall Hyde. It was by choosing the simple over the complex, the direct over the ornate, that Harcuba was able to achieve something multilayered and poetic in what remains after carving away with a copper wheel.The late Jiri Harcuba was a different type of innovator, one who also expanded beyond the strictures of tradition, taking glass engraving a near-Expressionist level of emotional complexity.
GLASS contributing editor Victoria Josslin uses the excellent exhibition at Tacoma’s Museum of Glass, “Links: Australian Artists and the Pacific Northwest,” as her lens on Australian art, contemplatingthe textured surfaces that connect blown and fused approaches, as well as the blending of techniques that Australian artists pioneered.
Esteemed flameworker Paul Stankard examines Iwao Matsushima’s journey backward in time to investigate ancient core-forming techniques through painstaking research and trial and error, updating the timeless forms with contemporary approaches to color and shape.
In the last feature, GLASS contributing editor William Warmus explores Narcissus Quagliata’s investigations of the marriage of painting and glass in lavishly imagined scenes of heaven and earth, creating works in glass that bring light to public spaces.
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