OPENING: Susan Glasgow Taylor exhibit at PS Gallery to include live modeling of chandelier dress

On Thursday, April 2, artist Susan Taylor Glasgow will give a talk about her new exhibition at the PS Gallery in Columbia, Missouri. The next day, her ideas will come to life as a live model exhibits one of her signature chandelier dresses for the opening reception on Friday evening. With a focus on her wearable work, Glasgow's talk will explore how she transfers her “domestic” skills of dressmaking into glass pieces that appropriate 1950s imagery. Several of her "Spring 2015" pieces are sewn, fitted glass components stitched together with nylon ribbon, resulting in compact, dressy handbags and colorful slices of cakes. They will be on view through May 30, 2015.

Glasgow has pursued a fragile “couture” concept as a way to segueway into glass art by harnesing her seamstress skills.  Once a professional dressmaker that ran an alteration shop, Glasgow would wear her own glass pieces to exhibition openings before she had gallery representation. It was an effective way of advertising what she could do with the material. 

She designed glass garments for the Glass Fashion Show in Corning in 2009 with Laura Donefer, but emphasized that her own work is less about fashion and more about “the dichotomy of women’s role in the household,” as she explains in her artist statement. However, she doesn’t deny the allure of a transparent, breakable gown.

“Here is this yielding, potentially dangerous garment that women still want to put on and wear,” she told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet in a telephone interview. “I’ve had people ask to wear my bodices to events as an outfit. So much of women’s clothing is like that [dangerous and uncomfortable], from undergarments to jewelry.”

Her ongoing series explores the domestic teaching that have led her to “cook and sew” with glass.

“I used to think that my artwork was about myself, but as I’m doing this I often think of my mother. She raised me with 1950s ideals so I always thought we were the traditional family, which no family is, but I really felt that we were being raised with wholesome and nostalgic ideals.”

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