OPENING: Rik Allen’s one-man (Space)Craft Movement lands in Santa Fe

Rik Allen brings together his skills as a glassblower and metalsmith in spacecraft from a rusting utopia.

Rik Allen honed his glassblowing skills as part of a close-knit team that transformed hot glass into rope, terra cotta, wood, and organic materials for the unique vision of William Morris that often brought the aesthetics of archeology to an ongoing project mining an idealized past. In his own work, Allen also creates objects that look like they’ve just been dug up from the earth, but these are objects from the future, or a vision of it from an earlier Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers era. Tonight at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, a solo exhibition of Allen’s work will feature a new fleet of rusting space-ships that mix steel and glass in vessels that echo with quiet solitude.

Rik Allen, Zue Alpha, 2010. Blown glass, silver, steel base. H 13, W 9, D 6 in. courtesy: blue rain gallery, santa fe

Running for most of the month of October, the exhibition entitled “Incortex” will showcase a number of new spaceship forms, their metal hulls weathered and worn in a manner more consistent with the elements of this world than Outer Space. The key to Allen’s sculptures is the glass, which offers a fleeting peek through the windshields of these transporters that have traveled far, and possibly crash-landed carrying unfulfilled dreams for the future from an earlier era. The interior architecture often features a solitary chair or open space that rings with a kind of Edward Hopper-esque emptiness that gives Allen’s work an entirely unique ambiance. Like the giant of American painting who captured a loneliness inherent in the modern urban landscape, there is a poignant edge to the three-dimensional depictions of these landscapes of the imagination.In Allen’s multi-media work, glass is a lens into fading dreams, and a membrane that protects a secret interior from the damaging universe outside.

To learn more about Allen’s work, read an interview with the artist that ran in the Hot Sheet in late 2009.

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