Thursday July 5, 2018 | by Olivia Ryder

CONVERSATION: Tanja Pak wants you to think about breathing (hers and yours)

Conscious breathing seem like a trendy idea, but it goes back centuries as an aspect of religious practice of many faiths. It is also the subject of a new body of work by Slovenian artist and University of Ljubljana fine-art professor Tanja Pak. An artist committed to sculpture, the design of beautiful glass objects, and the architecture of meditative spatial installations, Pak employs her breath to create objects that invite contemplation and self-awareness. For her exhibition curated by Nataša Ivanović, "The Breath in Between," on view at gallery TR3 in Ljubljana through October 2018, Pak presents a grouping of dimpled white glass forms that bear evidence of their previous state as temporarily liquid hot glass. In these poignant organic shapes that seem to huddle together, Pak seeks to document that meditative moment in between breaths. The gently collapsing glass shapes can be seen as a reference to lungs in mid-exhale. Pak also works in photography and poetry which help to elucidate and expand upon the ideas she eloquently evokes through the translucent glass.

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Friday June 29, 2018 | by Chelsea Liu

EXHIBITION: For its grand opening, the new Portheimka Glass Museum in Prague presents a Karen LaMonte exhibit "Clothed in Light"

Constructed in the 1720's to serve as a summer residence for the aristocratic Dientzenhofer family, the Baroque Portheimka Summer Palace has been repurposed as the Portheimka Glass Museum, the first institution devoted exclusively to glass art in Prague. The national cultural monument, named on its website “a baroque pearl of the Prague district of Smíchov,” was converted into a glass museum by Museum Kampa with the support of the Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation. Portheimka will present a permanent exhibition, host workshops for children, and is currently unveiling its first temporary exhibition, a display of American artist Karen LaMonte’s spectral glass figures that will remain on view through November 4, 2018.

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Thursday June 28, 2018 | by Andrew Page

Longtime executive director of the Glass Art Society Pam Koss reflects on her 14-year tenure and her marvelous Murano send-off

One thing the outgoing executive director of the Glass Art Society wants everyone to know is that she is not retiring. On Friday, June 29th, after 14 years at the helm of the artists' organization whose annual conference is a must-attend event for artists, collectors, and suppliers to the field, Pamela Koss is moving on, eagerly looking forward to starting the next chapter of her career. The Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet caught up with her during the closing night party of the 2018 conference, a historic event in Murano, Italy — a longtime dream Koss finally realized last month. Still keeping a vigilant eye on the proceedings around us, and occasionally breaking away to direct staff and volunteers, Koss was able to sit down for a chat after the fashion show, in which artists wearing heavy glass costumes had all safely disembarked from gondolas. A raucous Italian party band was playing note-for-note renditions of American R&B dance classics while the attendees danced away in a historic churchyard that had been outfitted with a high powered sound system and massive video screens. The shiny new technology was a sharp contrast with old world architecture and this mix of old and new permeated the historic conference and seemed to help break through some of the centuries-old traditions of secrecy about glass process and technique.

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Thursday June 28, 2018 | by Chelsea Liu

Denis Longchamps plans to explore history and boundaries as newly appointed executive director of the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery

When asked by Glass Quarterly about his attraction to the mediums of clay and glass the newly appointed executive director of the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery simply responded in an email interview: “The material." Denis Longchamps went on to explain that "both are transformed by fire. Clay and glass have always been at the core of my curatorial practice and I also like to include textiles, wood and metal to provide a broader context. I did take a few classes in clay and stained glass so there is a personal attraction to both mediums. But there is more — both are hard and strong materials yet fragile at the same time. These opposing forces offers many possibilities for concept exploration.” This abundance of possibilities reflects Longchamps view of the porous boundaries between art and craft, and his resistance to definitions and standard narratives.

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Wednesday June 27, 2018 | by Olivia Ryder

EXHIBITION: Mitchell Gaudet turns grim murder stats into powerful visualizations of the human cost of gun violence

It's only June but there have already been 76 murders in New Orleans this year, according to the New Orleans Murder Map created by the local Times-Picayune newspaper. This city world-famous for food and music is also quickly gaining a reputation as one of the most violent in the nation with 157 murders related to gun violence in 2017, earning it third place behind only St. Louis and Baltimore in the grim FBI per-capita crime report. Glass artist and activist Mitchell Gaudet, who was born in New Orleans and who earned his MFA at Tulane, decided the gun issue in his hometown needed to be better understood and confronted through works that turned these statistics into potent artistic statements.

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Friday June 22, 2018 | by Chelsea Liu

EXHIBITION: Norway's S12 mounts a major retrospective prior to a big move

Since its inception in 2007, S12 Studio and Gallery in Bergen, Norway, has pursued programs with a focus on artistic purity and authenticity. An artist-run gallery and workshop, its approach has been marked by the ambitious cultivation of creative sparks and a fluid relationship between artist and public, between the conceptual and the formal, and between glass and other media. Now in its 11th year, S12 is preparing to cross its most ambitious threshold yet: a retrospective of many of its former resident artists as one last spectacular exhibition before packing up and relocating to a new location.

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Thursday June 21, 2018 | by Olivia Ryder

CONVERSATION: Robert DuGrenier discusses the work in museum exhibition "Handle with Care" opening on Friday

Perhaps it's the fact that hot glass must be manipulated with implements but artists sculpting in glass seem uniquely drawn to hand tools as a subject. With his latest body of work featured in the exhibition “Handle with Care” opening this Friday at Vermont's Brattleboro Museum, Robert DuGrenier joins Mary Shaffer, Rick Beck, Lou Lynn, and others in exploring the nature and meaning of hand tools by making them, in part, out of glass. (Disclosure: Robert DuGrenier is a board member of UrbanGlass, which publishes the Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet.) Expanding on his earlier series “Out of the Ashes,” in which he combined blown and cast glass with the remains of tools and farming implements in a therapeutic process after a fire destroyed his historic barn in 2015, DuGrenier's new work grants tools a second, more permanent life in glass. By manipulating the glass more intentionally to create potentially functional handles for ax and hammer heads as well as other farm equipment, he mines the rich dichotomy between fragility and strength, making the viewer question the functionality of the tools even as they consider the poetic beauty of their highly evolved forms that make them extensions of the human body. In an exclusive telephone interview with the Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet, DuGrenier revealed insights into his process and approach.

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Tuesday June 19, 2018 | by Olivia Ryder

SEEN: Rob Wynne activates Brooklyn Museum's period collection with dynamic mirrored-glass wall works

Entering the Luce Center for American Art on the Brooklyn Museum's fifth floor, one immediately encounters Rob Wynne’s ethereal glass works that activate the adjacent nineteenth-century neoclassical marble statues of Pandora, Nydia, The Lost Pleiad, and Bacchante. Rob Wynne’s work re-contextualizes viewer perceptions of the historic sculptures perched atop black granite pedestals, enveloping them in a swirling timelessness of hand-poured mirrored-glass wall reliefs. On view through January 6, 2019, Wynne's 16 ephemeral glass works force a reexamination of historic American artworks and are presented in an exhibition entitled “Rob Wynne: FLOAT” curated by Brooklyn Museum chief curator Jennifer Y. Chi and assistant curator Margarita Karasoulas.

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Tuesday June 19, 2018 | by Chelsea Liu

CONVERSATION: Matthew Curtis on light, craft, and exhibiting internationally

Through July 15th, Australia-based artist Matthew Curtis is showcasing his latest body of work in the exhibit "Matthew Curtis: Intersect" at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe. The Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet asked him a few questions about how his work has been developing, what it's been like to exhibit internationally, and where he sees himself going from here. Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet: Does the work in this exhibition represent a new direction for you? Matthew Curtis: This work signifies a subtle shift in my use of the material. It is a continuation in exploring the blown glass bubble, in slicing these elements and compiling them into fields of components. These are then fused together, creating a plane of glass, reminiscent of the cross section of the internal structure of organic growth. So there are similarities in both narrative and structure, yet I have been able to work with more abstracted color fields.…

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Thursday June 14, 2018 | by Chelsea Liu

EXHIBITION: Bellevue Arts Museum readies its "Glasstastic" biennial surveying Northwest glass art

From Chihuly to Tagliapietra, glass has long had a storied history in the Pacific Northwest. That the Bellevue Museum in Washington will be devoting the last in its series of materials-based biennials to the medium is a fitting finale for the fifth iteration. The museum's juried exhibition has been occurring every two years, and offers a curated platform for regional, established and up-and-coming voices in art, craft, and design. On the heels of past shows on clay, fiber, wood, and metal, this fall's 2018 "Glasstastic Biennale" will celebrate the medium perhaps closest to Seattle’s heart. As executive director and chief curator of BAM Benedict Heywood stated in an exhibition announcement: “With Seattle being the undisputed center for the development of glass as an art form in North America, it was natural that this medium should have been selected to culminate the Museum's series of media-based biennials...The simplicity of its composition, the complexity of its production, the many forms it can take—blown, cast, frit, stained—as well as its many uses, from the stained-glass of a medieval cathedral to the modernist skyscraper, from the Venetian goblet to the IKEA tealight, attest to the fact that glass is a paradoxical material, that has inspired the artists of the Northwest for generations."

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