Jay Musler, "Blue", constructed glass, oil paint, 2010.
An exhibition of new work by Jay Musler opens tonight from 5 – 8 PM (and will run through August 31) at the Ken Saunders Gallery in Chicago. A glass sculptor with an unusual and eccentric style, Musler works with subtly cartoonish shape, a dry, dessicated color palette, and the tropes of repetition and difference to construct objects that both absorb and unsettle the viewer: exhibiting the fascination of an artifact from a slightly different universe, something that can’t quite be placed – and is therefore all the more alluring.
Musler’s technique for producing his works is as unconventional as the end results. Though he once worked with hot glass, he now cuts pieces of plate glass, grinds their surfaces, shapes them with a torch, and then paints them with oils before gluing them together. The result is what one might call a “de-glassifying” of glass, overtaking its shiny, translucent qualities with a dried-out, brittle look. As James Yood noted in his Summer 2008 profile of the artist for GLASS, Musler is that rare glass artist whose material hides its liquid beginnings, whose glass “often looks like dried pasta, little thin and crispy wafers of brittle glass glued together in crunchy and meandering grids that are actually surprisingly taut and focused. He’s dedicated to dessication; his surfaces sometimes resemble that of a sponge, ready to soak up moisture and never give it back.”
Hanging sculptures like “Blue” (pictured above) suggest a surreal architecture, a dream-skyscraper sprouted from the ground. Soft, sapped blue, green, and yellow hues flow towards a dry lightness in the center, while a pattern of rectangular rooms full of intricately arranged slim glass panels suggests an extensive, shadowy network, a clandestine pulsing of life. Adding to this sense of a self-enclosed world are lamp-shaped objects attached like arms to the sides of the sculpture, which give an anthropomorphic impression and simultaneously conjure the anonymity of streetlights on a (whimsical) city block.
In the exhibition’s press release, Musler is quoted as stating that his work is about “constructing patterns. I see things in patterns. Patterns are everywhere; in nature, landscapes, and architecture. You can pull patterns out of anything.” Indeed, Musler’s work represents a way of seeing – in which a certain desire for repetition meets a lush, eerie dream-world that moves, whether in the sense of a movement upward or downward, a complexity that plays upon the endless rearranging of a central pattern, or a semblance of form-repetition on the surface of a hidden, breathing world underneath. The intrigue of the works lies in the fact that Musler’s way of seeing, projected onto the works, becomes the viewer’s way of seeing, too.
- Lee Gaizak Brooks
IF YOU GO:
Jay Musler at the Ken Saunders Gallery
July 23rd-August 31st
Ken Saunders Gallery
230 West Superior Street
Chicago, IL 60654
Tel: 312-573-1400
Website: kensaundersgallery.com