OPENING: Light and Shadow at Glasmuseet Ebeltoft

This Friday, November 30th, Denmark’s Glasmuseet Ebeltoft will unveil a new exhibition entitled “Light and Shadow,” which celebrates glass and light as equal partners through works that reflect and radiate. A wide-ranging group exhibit of work by an international roster of 24 artists, their diverse expressions in glass are unified by the overarching theme. Among those with work being exhibited: Lise Autogena, Ian Micah Gilula, Eraldo Mauro, Finn Lynggaard, Graham Stone, Gregor Bendel, Hans Frode, Hiroshi Mitsuishi, Ian Micah Gilula, Jan-Willem van Zijst, Jeff Zimmer, Jon Kuhn, Jørgen Wilkens, Karin Widell, Kazumi Tsuji, Kjell Engman, Lise Autogena, Lukas Derow, Paula Bartron, Robert W. Stephan, Sander Boeijink, Steffen Tast, Velta Vilmanis, Yoko Tanaka, Yumiko Yoshimoto, and Sydney Cash.

Sydney Cash, creator of light sculptures that toy with reflection and shadow in visually intriguing and sometimes confounding interplays, is represented by his brand new wall installation Ziggy (2012). Cash’s glass panel installations incorporating reflection were recently seen at OK Harris Gallery this summer, as well as at a live jazz installation at The Falcon for which he synced shifting light effects with the motion of the music. He is currently working on a painting series, and two of his large-scale light sculptures will appear next month at the Orlando Museum of Art.

For Cash, light is the “primary medium”— a vehicle he uses to generate the “light object,” whose ephemerality (Switch off the light source and it’s gone.) always attracts. Ziggy exemplifies the title of the Glasmuseet Ebeltoft exhibition: the delicate, vine-like filigree shapes in the glass panels cast shadows downward while their reflection shines upward, creating, in effect, an inverse duplicate. The playful design adds to a library of glyphs developed by the artist over time. Dizzying combinations of positive and negative space is a leading character in Cash’s work, provoking both a straightforward curiosity about how the optical effect is achieved, as well as a meditation on duality, the diametrically opposed ways of perceiving a single object or emotion.

In a telephone interview, Cash told GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet that the studio is where he goes “to metabolize [emotion] by giving form to it.” Although imposing control on beams of light requires a high level of premeditation to execute, Cash is delighted when experimentation leads the process along a different trajectory. In this video showing Ziggy’s creation he speaks of the “playful power” wielded by an artist working with light.

The Glasmuseet Ebeltoft distinguishes itself as one of the more provocatively curated glass museums, and last year celebrated its 25^th anniversary with the release of the book Glassified: 25 years with contemporary glass, a tribute to the legacy of notable glass artists in the museum’s extensive holdings. Recently, the museum’s permanent collection was reset, with major artworks from the 1,500-work collection now on view on the ground floor, mobilizing their individual story-telling power in the context of Studio Glass history. Spanning pivotal moments in the creative lives of artists from Erwin Eisch to Klaus Moje to Tróndur Patursson, the works are accompanied by narratives detailing how their creation represents a significant juncture, not only in the vision of their makers, but in the recognition of Studio Glass as its own art form.

—Shirin Borthwick