Opening: Nancy Callan’s collaboration with painter Julia Ricketts at Traver Tacoma Saturday evening

Nancy Callan and Julia Ricketts, Listen I, Blown and carved glass. H 16 1/2, W 12, D 7 in. courtesy: traver gallery

Nancy Callan is no stranger to canework and elaborate patterning which she regularly employs in her vividly colored blown-glass work. When the Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet last checked in with her (see the 2009 3 Questions interview here), she was knee-deep in “Clam Clouds,” her series of strongly patterned blown forms that she named for their resemblance to a certain shellfish and puffy cottony clouds. Callan referred to this work as “light and airy.” Her newest body of work, for which there will be an opening reception at Traver Gallery Tacoma tomorrow evening, includes canework and patterning, but the mood is introspective and the colors more primary in hue in a series of work that lends itself to a more contemplative consideration. The reason for this shift in styles is no doubt that this is a collaboration with painter and printmaker Julia Ricketts.

The work in this exhibition, cleverly titled “She Said, She Said,” grew out of a residency last April at the Museum of Glass. In a shift from the whimsical cloud shapes, here the body is the focus of these forms, often transparent to let the light through the bold primary colored, organic shapes with canes arranged like sinewy sheets of muscle, or an astrological constellation. In all the work, there is a charged dialogue between three dimensional form and two-dimensional rendering.

Also in the exhibition will be canvases by Ricketts, an accomplished painter and printmaker. Seeing the collaborative work side by side with individual works, it is clear how two artists brought their unique visions and styles together into work that takes individual solo effort into new territory.

The Traver exhibition, which runs through October 10th, will be Callan and Ricketts’ third collaborative show.

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