OPENING: Katherine Gray’s “A Rainbow Like You” is a Feast for the Senses

UPDATED 9/19/2015

After a two-month run at Heller Gallery in New York City,  A Rainbow Like You (2015) a glass work by Katherine Gray will go back on exhibit on September 21 at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum at California State University, San Bernadino, where Gray is an associate professor. Her recent New York exhibition invited visitors to experience the sight, sound and smell of glass being blown. Meant to be participatory, Gray's pieces are based on her personal connection with the material she works with, and the impressions she has being around it. A presentation of specific affiliations, each work communicates a specific sensation that the artist experiences, which visitors, even if they have never been in a glass studio, can also know.

Perhaps the most eye-catching of the works at Heller, A Rainbow Like You (2015), was an intense visual experience for the viewer, glass chalices, cups, bowls, and vases all stand together in one mass atop a table with spotlights to create a flawless, gradient rainbow pool of light. The collection of glass pieces create an expansive and complete variation of prismatic hues, each shade distinct from the last, arranged so that it is one whole spectral view. The light floods out, projecting onto the white wall of the gallery, color passing through the clear medium. Gray's setup glorifes an inherent quality in glass, a reverence to the property through her eyes. The varied surfaces of the glass — some giving off violent glares from complete transparency, others offering a more solid and opaque reflection — accentuate the different colors' varied visual textures. 

The California exhibition is titled after the main piece in the Heller exhibition. In the works organized in the show "A Rainbow Like You”, Gray focuses on the sense of light as she employs bright theatrical spotlights shining through a wide-range of commercially made and studio-blown glassware, creating projections on the walls above. The disorienting effects of these dappled diffusions of light and form attempts to explore the production, consumption and the natural environment. 

The New York exhibit explored the other senses of smell and hearing. Her work Paper, Sleeve, Wax, Block (2015) is made up of four identical clear glass flacons in a line. Standing at 52 inches, with up-curved elongated necks, each bottle contained a unique scent, a trait in Gray's glassmaking atmosphere. A large circular opening extended out the long, stem-like neck, where one put their face to come into contact with the odor. Whether pleasant or offensive, each one was meant to be an honest reproduction of something characteristic to her experience. The first, Wax, vaguely sweet like any powdery perfume, as the honeyed smell of heat with beeswax used to keep glass tools from sticking. Another, Sleeve, caught one off-guard the most. Salty, dank and warm, it was a curious and uneasy odor to confront, which was that of an old, sweaty glove worn by glassblowers. Distinct, Gray's chosen smells were meticulously concocted through her collaboration with Opus Oils perfumer Kedra Hart. Very specific ingredients, such as seaweed, patchouli and carrot seed, were incorporated into Block, which mimicked the smell of the cherry wood shaping tool that glassmakers use to put a "skin" on glass while working. 

Back and Forth (2015) is the view of a cup on a wall, over a speaker. The cup's rim was into the wall so it is like seeing it sideways and truncated, and the holes of the speaker can be seen  with slight distortions through the clear glass' grooves and swirls. A fuzzy, buzzing sound became present within a certain interval of seconds, becoming audible and fading. It was a recording of glass blowing, a sound that is contained and vibrates in the drinking cup. The sound, which is not identifiable to the average listener, was encased in the physical construction, making it almost viewable instead of auditory alone.