OPENING: Fashioned in glass, tools and implements become “Everyday Heroes” in MFA exhibition

Slate Grove, Tools of the Trade, 2013. Blown, sculpted, and fabricated glass. H 12, W 18, D 7 in.

Artist Slate Grove loves cars. Before he enrolled in the MFA glass program at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, he exhibited oversize automotive key fobs and hood ornaments during the 2010 Glass Art Society Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. For his thesis exhibition, Grove turns his attention to those who repair machines by paying homage to the tools that make their work possible. But he doesn’t stop with auto mechanics: he expands his purview to working class jobs of all kinds, elevating them through the painstaking remaking of the instruments used by janitors, cleaners, tailors, knitters, and, slightly off-topic, boxers.

Slate Grove, Cleanser, 2013. Blown, sculpted, and fabricated glass. H 19, W 19, D 12 in.

In the exhibition catalog essay, Gary Justis, associate professor of art at Illinois State University, attempts to put Grove’s work into a larger perspective about class and the status of manual labor in contemporary society. “Grove’s understands the myriad sacrifices of these invisible workers, celebrates those sacrifices through his art, and endorses those workers as heroes.”

In the artist’s statement in his exhibition catalog, Grove writes: “Growing up in a blue-collar town of Fort Dodge, IA, I was surrounded by hard work. Gypsum mills. Limestone quarries, meat packing plants and trucking companies provided the majority of jobs in town. Like many Midwestern town,s, there was no shortage of strong willed, physical folks with impeccable work ethic to fill those jobs.”

Slate Grove, Zippers and Hems, 2013. Sculpted and flameworked glass. H 10, W 10, D 2 in.

It is fitting that Grove honors the anonymous army of manual laborers through his own labor, choosing to remake the mass-produced tools, gloves, and implements of their work by hand, each object the result of numerous studies as to creating convincing replicas in transparent glass form. By remaking these objects as one-of-a-kind sculptures, Grove elevates them into poetic terrain.

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