PERFORMANCE: Jocelyne Prince channels painter El Greco in Webcast performance art piece today

The invitation to today’s Webcast at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington.

This afternoon at 5 PM EST (2 PM PST), the hot shop at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, will be taken over by a performance art event by RISD professor Jocelyne Prince, known for her inquiries into the material properties of glass, which she knits into installations and performances. Her newest performance piece will be broadcast live from the museum via this Web link.

The event is an exploration though performance of the painting and aesthetic breakthroughs of the highly influential 16th-century painter El Greco whose unconventional style prefigured Expressionism and Cubism among other art movements centuries later. In an email exchange with the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, Prince writes: “A pulegoso fire ball marks the beginning of the El Greco Revisited Live Event. His painting Coronation of the Virgin sets the stage for an intersection between glass, action and painting. Re-enacting the ephemeral and ‘other worldly’ qualities of El Greco’s clouds glassblowers make cloud-like shapes out of the hot fine-bubbled glass. These forms are left to self anneal causing stress and more than likely breakage. The fragile bulbous forms are positioned on a tiered stage in to recreate a cloud cluster. As the cloud placement begins a live model is hoisted over the stage and for the duration of the performance she hovers just above the forms… “

Having marveled at Prince’s inventive marriage of sound and hot glass process in a 2010 performance at the Glass Artist Association of Canada conference in Montreal, the Hot Sheet can confidently recommend watching this afternoon’s performance live from the Hot Shop in Tacoma, Washington.