2003 The Times of India:
"HYDERABAD: Glass sculptures created by Sisir Sahana are on display for three days from August 25 at the L V Prasad Eye Hospital Art Gallery.
The sculptor has compressed, fused, moulded and melted glass of all sizes and shapes to form faces, birds and trees.
Sahana said he has used a technique known as 'casting' wherein glass made from sand, potash and other raw materials is framed around painted glass.
The sculptor has also used a 'fusion' technique to melt coloured glass pieces into representations of birds and trees. "I have attempted to represent life and forms in a realistic manner,'' Sisir Sahana said.
Also on display are his acrylic paintings that showcase the harsh realities of life. In one of the paintings, for instance, farmers are shown working in the fields even as highways encroach upon the fields.
Selected sculptures are on sale and interested art lovers can purchase them for Rs.16,000 and more."
"Mirroring life through glass sculptures." Asia Africa Intelligence Wire. 2003. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-24208954_ITM
2003 Cheryl Petten:
"When most of us think of Native American art, works created from glass aren't usually what first comes to mind. But a visit to an exhibit being hosted by the Heard Museum in Phoenix this summer could change that.
Fusing Traditions: Transformations in Glass By Native American Artists opened at the museum in April, and runs until the end of August. The exhibit features the work of 18 Native artists from across North America, some of whom have been working in the medium as early as the 1960s and 1970s.
While exhibits in the past have looked at the work of individual Native glass artists, this exhibit is the first to provide an overview of Native glass art as an art movement. The exhibit was put together by co-curators Carolyn Kastner and Roslyn Tunis, who met through happenstance and a mutual interest in Native glass art.
Kastner, curator of the Museum of Craft & Folk Art in San Francisco, explained how the exhibit came about.
"The most mature artists in this exhibition have been working for more than 20 years. And yet no one had ever put an exhibition together that looked at the history of how all these people came to work in glass," she said. "And so in the summer of 2000, I began to gather information to work on this based on my knowledge of a few artists, primarily coming out of the southwest, that I knew about. And when I began to ask around here in the San Francisco Bay area, someone said to me, 'Are you working with Roslyn Tunis on her glass show?' And I was just floored. Because in 20 years, nobody had done this, and now somebody's telling me somebody else is doing this. So we met, and she had a similar epiphany on a trip to Haines, Alaska, and she saw an exhibit of primarily northwest and Alaskan artists in Haines at a small gallery there. And she had been thinking the same thing."
Tunis, an independent curator, had been focusing on the work of Preston Singletary, a glass artist of Tlingit ancestry, who grew up in Seattle, while Kastner's focus had been on the work of Tony Jojola, an artist from the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico.
"So we had these sort of two points, with Tony Jojola, who does really very free and open work, and Preston Singletary, who's very detailed and elaborate in the kinds of work he produced. And they're like the two poles of this kind of artistic production at this point in time," Kastner explained.
Singletary came on board the project, serving as a consulting curator to the exhibit.
"Sort of keeping us on track about the sensitivity to the Native traditions and that kind of thing."
What Singletary also did was introduce Kastner and Tunis to the next generation of glass artists. Students in their 20s who are learning glass art from Singletary and Jojola.
One of the ways in which the newest generation of glass artists differs from the artists who have been working in the medium for some time is in the approach they take in combining glass with their Native culture.
Whereas the older artists, those in their 30s and 40s, faced more resistance and more limitations on what they could create, the younger artists are approaching their art with more freedom, explained Kastner.
"For instance, Tony Jojola had difficulties. He's from Isleta Pueblo and his pueblo rejected the medium, and when he tried to open a school there, they didn't want a glass school, because it wasn't traditional," she said. "So with these new, younger generations, they didn't have any of that political limitation, or hesitation. They just embraced glass and their Native culture, and they are making things that are extraordinary, and not limited in any way."
One artist whose works demonstrates this freedom to combine the medium and the culture is Robert Tannahill, a Metis artist of Mohawk and Scottish descent, who has created a series of blown glass figures he has called the False Face series.
"He has blown glass into a wooden cylinder, and what happens then, he's burned out some holes, and it allows the glass to expand outside of the wood, and actually burns and chars the wood at the same time .... He's Mohawk, and in the Mohawk tradition, masks are carved on the tree, and then at a certain point when the mask is done, it's taken off, it's cut away from the living tree. But it's carved, actually, on the tree before it's removed. It's not created from a plank of wood. So the artists were doing a couple of things. One is they were creating really ferocious masks that were meant to scare people, to terrify people, and they were used for ritual purposes. And when you look at Robert Tannahill's pieces, they're grotesque, and the glass flows out of these holes and gravity works on it. And so you can see all the characteristics of glass ... it's not using it in another way, it's allowing the glass to just show its properties, to expand and to drip and to do things like that. But it's also similar, not in its look, to the old false face mask, but in his way of working with contingencies and natural imperfections in the same way that the Mohawk carver would have originally done on the tree. Because once you start carving into a tree, you open the tree up and then there are knotholes and things you didn't know about, and the artist would work around those and they would become part of the mask. And that's what Robert Tanahill is doing," she said.
"He's creating art, and he's doing that on his own, because at the same time, he refers to the series as autobiographical. In the series, he uses names like a ghost from my grandmother's basement, and things like that. So that it's taken completely out of the realm of the sacred, and he's working from a concept, which is this false face, scary mask that's carved from nature, but it doesn't look a thing like it. So the point is that there are no limits, both on his artistic intention, because he's inventing new ways of working with glass, and at the very same time, he's not being limited by the traditions of the false face."
In addition to the works of Jojola, Singletary and Tannahill, the exhibit also features Choctaw artist Marcus Amerman, who uses glass beads to create portraits of contemporary figures such as Brooke Shields and Janet Jackson, and Coast Salish artist Susan Point, for whom glass is but one of the many mediums in which she works.
The works of C.S. Tarpley are also featured in the exhibit. Tarpley, who lists Choctaw, Chickasaw and Anglo as his heritage, recreates traditional pottery forms in blown glass, then employs his experience as a goldsmith and lapidary, sandblasting decorations into the glass surface, then electroplating it with metal.
Other artists in the exhibit include Salish artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, Navajo artist Conrad House, Hopi artist Ramson Lomatewama, Quinalt artist Martin Oliver, Inupiat artist Larry Ahvakana, Salish artist Shaun Peterson, Alaskan Native artist John Hagen, Tlingit artist Clarissa Hudson, Nuu-chanulth artist Joe David, Pawnee artist Brian Barber, Siberian Y'upic artist Michael Carius, and Tlingit artist Wayne Price.
The Fusing Traditions exhibit originally opened at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art in September 2002, and then traveled to Los Angeles, where it appeared at the Los Angeles Museum of Craft and Folk Art before coming to the Heard Museum. After its run in Phoenix, the exhibit will be at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History before heading to Alaska. The exhibit will open at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art in February 2004, and will travel to the Alaska State Museum in Juneau in May 2004.
For more information about the exhibit, contact the Heard Museum at 602-252-8840, or visit the museum's Web site at www.heard.org."
Petten, Cheryl. "Exhibit explores work of native glass artists. (All My Relations)." Windspeaker. Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta (AMMSA). June 1, 2003. AccessMyLibrary. 5 Nov. 2009. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-23634044_ITM
2003 C.R. Roberts:
"The virtues and distinctions of Tacoma were once compared to the likes of Spokane, Portland and Seattle.
Times change. Cities grow.
In this month's issue of the upscale Conde Nast Traveler, Tacoma finds its match alongside Bangkok, Riyadh, Innsbruck and Fuji City.
In the fourth installment of the magazine's annual look at consequential architecture worldwide -- in an article called "The Next Seven Wonders of the World" -- Tacoma's Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art earns a two-page spread.
Featuring one fine photograph.
There's the silver-scaled cone reflected in a pool of bobbing apples. There's the suspension bridge seemingly tethered at one end by the curved roof of the Tacoma Dome. There's Thea Foss Waterway below a soft blue sky.
"When you have a picture like that, it makes a tremendous impact. It's something people will remember," said Julie Gangler, director of public relations at the Tacoma Regional Convention & Visitor Bureau.
"That's the foremost travel magazine in the country, it's the most highly regarded," she said.
She said a mention such as this one can have a positive effect -- one that can be measured in prestige as well as counted in tourist dollars.
"People will clip it and save it. We'll have people show up clutching the article. It's the sort of thing, down the road, that will continue to produce tourism," Gangler said.
Articles such as this "definitely validate Tacoma. It makes us look like we have a world-class museum. And we do."
Conde Nast Traveler is not the only national publication looking at Tacoma this month.
Metropolis Magazine, prestigious among architects and designers nationwide, focuses eight pages of its April attention on several Tacoma projects, including the Tacoma Art Museum, University of Washington Tacoma and Union Station, as well as the glass museum.
"(T)he City of Destiny has pursued an ambitious center-city redevelopment strategy stressing new arts and educational institutions, cultural tourism and a degree of historic preservation," the article says.
Arthur Erickson's glass museum is "strong, lucid ... a retreat from his recent Post-Modern essays and a return to his Modernist roots." Antoine Predock's Tacoma Art Museum is "subtly detailed."
And a Seattle designer is heard to say, "Seattle's renaissance is in Tacoma."
"Our goal is to create a buzz about Tacoma," said Becky Japhet of the city's Economic Development Department.
Hers is the office that has created an advertising campaign to promote Tacoma among the business leaders of surrounding counties, attempting to court them into relocating here.
"The more you raise Tacoma's visibility, the better it is," she said. "The word is getting out."
Had the city bought an equivalent amount of advertising since 1999, it would have spent $1,045,797, the city department estimates. That's how much space Tacoma has received in publications ranging from The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times to Asahi Shimbun in Japan and Tekniika & Talous in Finland.
At Conde Nast Traveler, spokesman Jon Buchmeyer said nominations for the Seven Wonders feature are submitted from "world-leading design and architectural firms."
Nominations "span the gamut of architecture, coming from the ones who know what's going on, what's cool."
Tacoma may be cool in April, but what about tomorrow?
Ruthie Reinert, head of the convention and visitor bureau, is looking toward June.
April may have seen the area featured in Conde Nast Traveler and Metropolis -- and even in Courier Magazine, aimed at members of the National Tour Association -- but Reinert has begun thinking about early summer.
That's when a band of travel writers will visit the city for a gathering of the American Society of Travel Writers.
"Sweep the street and plant the pansies," Reinert said.
They're on their way."
Roberts, C.R. "World-Class Publications Take Note of Tacoma, Wash., Resurgence." Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. 2003. AccessMyLibrary. 5 Nov. 2009 published April 4, 2003. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-6078351_ITM
2003 Jen Graves:
"Eighteen months after he arrived and six months after the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art opened, chief curator Neil Watson is leaving.
He'll depart at the end of the month to become director of the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington, where he said colleagues interested in his work contacted him in late summer, not long after the Museum of Glass opened.
Watson was in Tacoma 18 months. He organized "Some Assembly Required," the group show that's up now.
"This was a hard choice," said 49-year-old Watson.
He has been curating at museums for less than a decade and this is his first chance to run a museum rather than simply manage exhibitions. And the Connecticut native and his wife want their infant daughter closer to their East Coast families.
"I have always had a wonderful time here, but we did have that Lou Piniella syndrome where it was far from everything for us," Watson said.
When museum director Josi Callan will begin the search for an artistic leader is unclear. Callan will use guest curators to fill in this year's schedule, Watson said.
Callan was unavailable for comment Saturday.
"We're taking a look at strategic vision and that will include curatorial," said museum spokeswoman Julie Pisto.
Watson is not a glass specialist, though he briefly studied with Dale Chihuly in the 1970s while earning a printmaking degree at Rhode Island School of Design.
After graduating, he was an illustrator for Atlantic Monthly and Houghton Mifflin before becoming a painter.
Established galleries in San Francisco and New York sold his abstracted landscape paintings in the 1980s. For the first half of the 1990s, Watson managed a SoHo gallery.
With his connections, the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida in 1995 hired him as curator of contemporary art. A year later, he went to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, where he was contemporary art curator for five years.
At the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts -- a smaller, non-collecting space with galleries and 26 artists' studios -- Watson can work closely with artists.
"I came out of the studio and I feel more affinity with that," he said.
He enjoyed a good relationship with Callan that he hopes to continue in exchanges from his new post, he said: "I really loved working with her. She's a strong director."
Contemporary art in all mediums is Watson's true love.
"I was hired (in Tacoma) because I was a curator of contemporary art, not a curator of glass," he said.
Two other staff members who helped the museum open departed last month, Pisto said: a new store manager and security director are already on board."
Graves, J. "Tacoma, Wa. Glass museum curator takes new job." January 12, 2003. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. 2003. AccessMyLibrary. 5 Nov. 2009 http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-7943080_ITM
2003 MetNews:
"A California glass artist cannot copyright his lifelike glass-in-glass jellyfish sculptures because they are not sufficiently distinctive, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.
The panel overturned a preliminary injunction granted last year by U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell of the Eastern District of California.
Burrell enjoined Christopher Lowry, a Hawaii artist, from making or selling sculptures with “a vertically oriented, colorful, fanciful jellyfish with tendril-like tentacles and a rounded bell encased in an outer layer of rounded clear glass that is bulbous at the top and tapering toward the bottom to form roughly a bullet shape, with the jellyfish portion of the sculpture filling almost the entire volume of the outer, clear glass shroud.”
The judge ruled that Lowry’s sculptures appeared to breach several copyrights registered by Richard Satava. Lowry admitted that saw a picture of Satava’s sculptures in a magazine in 1996 and that a customer brought him a Satava sculpture to repair in 1997.
It was undisputed that Satava started making the sculptures, products of a centuries-old art form, several years before Lowry began making his.
But Judge Ronald Gould, writing yesterday for the Ninth Circuit, said Satava could not obtain copyright protection for his works because they were not “original” works within the meaning of the Copyright Act.
The originality requirement, the judge explains, means that ideas, or “expressions that are standard, stock, or common to a particular subject matter or medium are not protectable under copyright law.”
The judge elaborated:
“Satava may not prevent others from depicting jellyfish with tendril-like tentacles or rounded bells, because many jellyfish possess those body parts. He may not prevent others from depicting jellyfish in bright colors, because many jellyfish are brightly colored. He may not prevent others from depicting jellyfish swimming vertically, because jellyfish swim vertically in nature and often are depicted swimming vertically—.
“Satava may not prevent others from depicting jellyfish within a clear outer layer of glass, because clear glass is the most appropriate setting for an aquatic animal—.He may not prevent others from depicting jellyfish ‘almost filling the entire volume’ of the outer glass shroud, because such proportion is standard in glass-in-glass sculpture. And he may not prevent others from tapering the shape of their shrouds, because that shape is standard in glass-in-glass sculpture.”
Gould acknowledged that a combination of unprotectable elements, taken together, might be something original and thus entitled to protection. But that is not the case with Satava’s sculptures, he said.
“The selection of the clear glass, oblong shroud, bright colors, proportion, vertical orientation, and stereotyped jellyfish form, considered together, lacks the quantum of originality needed to merit copyright protection,” Gould wrote.
The judge noted that the panel had looked at dozens of photographs of glass-in-glass jellyfish sculptures, and said in a footnote that they were basically similar, with each artist adding or omitting some standard element. The court would be allowing Satava “to fence off private reserves from within the public domain” if it allowed him copyright protection, Gould declared.
Judge Barry G. Silverman and Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Weiner, a visiting jurist from Philadelphia, concurred.
The case is Satava v. Lowry, 02-16347."
Unknown. MetNews Staff Writer. "Panel rejects copyright protection for jellyfish sculptures." March 21, 2003. Metropolitan News Empire. acc. November 2, 2009. http://www.metnews.com/articles/sata032103.htm
2003:""Marvin Lipofsky: A Glass Odyssey"
2003-07-19 until 2003-10-12
Oakland Museum of California
Oakland, CA, USA
A translucent pink bubble punctured by a tube of clear red glass, a multicolored primordial glass form, a sinuous two-foot-long purple tube of flocked glass ending in a bulb that looks strangely sensual -- these are just three of the approximately 60 works that will be on display in the exhibition Marvin Lipofsky: A Glass Odyssey, at the Oakland Museum of California from July 19 to Oct. 12, 2003. This retrospective exhibition spans the 40-year career of Berkeley artist Marvin Lipofsky, founder of the California studio glass movement and one of the world's best-known glass artists.
The early works in the exhibition are simple bubble and bottle forms. In the 1970s, Lipofsky began working with subjects from popular culture, evidenced in the humorous "Great American Food Series," where pickles and hamburgers were fashioned of glass. In the "California Loop Series," Lipofsky created sensuous forms with flocking and plated glass surfaces. The pieces for which he is best known today are the three-dimensional globe-shaped forms he has made in many variations at glass factories the world over. These sculptural forms are most often semi-opaque on the outside, inviting the viewer to explore their inner dimensions.
Studio glass, or glass sculpture, was made in Czechoslovakian factories as early as the 1950s. It was pioneered in the United States in the early 1960s by artist Harvey Littleton, one of Lipofsky's teachers when he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lipofsky received a Master of Science degree in 1963 and an M.F.A. in sculpture in 1964 from the University of Wisconsin.
After graduation Lipofsky joined the faculty of UC Berkeley, where he established the second studio glass program in the country. In 1967 he founded the glass program at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. The work of Lipofsky and his students during the 1960s and '70s made the San Francisco Bay Area one of the centers of the early studio glass movement. "Cutting-edge talent," said Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown recently, "that was Lipofsky's gift to the world."
In 1970, Lipofsky began a global odyssey that would take him abroad on more than 50 journeys -- from Italy, Sweden and Poland to Taiwan and China. He was one of the first glass artists to travel to Czechoslovakia, a famed glass center to which he has returned a number of times during his career. He has worked with local artisans and materials in factory settings around the world to produce blown glass for his artworks. The resulting pieces were shipped back to his Berkeley studio for cold working -- sawing, grinding, sandblasting and polishing.
The exhibition includes large photographs of Lipofsky working with glass artists in workshops, studios and factories throughout the world. A video of the process of finishing glass in his Berkeley studio brings Lipofsky and the glassmaking process to life in the gallery space. Also included are works on paper, working drawings and tools revealing the artist's creative process.
As a teacher, Lipofsky has trained a generation of artists who currently staff studio glass programs and operate glass studios throughout the country. He was a founder of the Glass Art Society, and has been editor of its journal. He has had more than 40 solo exhibitions and has been included in hundreds of group shows. He twice received NEA Fellowships and has been selected as an American Crafts Council Fellow and as a Living Treasure of California by the Crocker Art Museum.
His work appears in more than 80 museum and corporate collections and in numerous private collections. Museums that own works by Lipofsky include, in addition to the Oakland Museum of California, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; and the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Baizerman, curator of decorative arts at the Oakland Museum of California.
Marvin Lipofsky: A Glass Odyssey is accompanied by a catalog of the same name, edited by exhibition curator Suzanne Baizerman, published by the Oakland Museum of California and distributed by the University of Washington Press (2003).
The exhibition is sponsored by the Oakland Museum Women's Board, with additional support provided by the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass and individual patrons."
Unknown. "Marvin Lipofsky A glass oddessy." Absolute Arts. Accessed October 18, 2009. http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2003/07/18/31219.html
2003 Mary Thomas:
"With her engaging exhibition "Matter," Brooklyn artist Jill Reynolds not only shakes up standard expectations of what glass art looks like, but also throws into question isolate readings of scientific precepts.
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| This glass skeleton by Jill Reynolds, titled "Gnomon" -- the word for the column on a sundial that casts the shadow -- adds a reminder of mortality to the passing of time. In the background, "Beauty," from 2000, comprises mirrored glass letters that tempt the viewer, in vain, to look for his reflection. Photo Credit: Pittsburg Post-Gazette. |
Intent upon putting Pittsburgh on the map as a nationally and internationally important site for studio glass education and creation, the center also has in its mission the support of glass artists and the education of the public about contemporary glass through exhibitions and talks.
The center's second resident artist, Reynolds contributes with a conceptually strong exhibition that's flavored with the medium rather than intoxicated by it. Indeed, at times it disappears altogether: Those toothpick-imbedded Styrofoam balls are just that, and not some tour de force illusion.
Reynolds -- who was an emerging-artist-in-residence at Pilchuk Glass School, Stanwood, Wash., and who's received a commission from the Corning Museum of Glass -- has exhibited at, among other venues, the MIT List Visual Art Center and the Seattle Art Museum.
The Hodge Gallery, partitioned for the exhibition, shows earlier works made as parts of larger installations in the first section, which illustrate Reynolds' humor, irreverence and palpable querying. "Are we considering all the angles?" you can almost hear the artist asking.
Sand pours through the dozen bulbous hourglass-like globes of the motor-driven "Analog," referencing the unremitting passage of months and hours. The three small, transparent glass skulls of "Ancestor, Recollection, Memorandum" contain, respectively, a smaller carbon skull, rose-colored sand that's seeping out and an alphabet-inscribed slate that calls to mind the Rosetta Stone. "Body Alphabet," represented in 26 backlit slides, inspires new ways of looking at both the body and letters.
Most exciting, because it is of one cloth, is the work made at the center shown in the second gallery.
The centerpiece is "Table of Elements," a take-off on chemistry's periodic table, with numbers of mixed-media objects arranged on a light table, some of them modified lab vessels like flasks or test tubes. Elsewhere, cute-as-buttons twins connected with a rubber hose umbilicus, "Replicate," raises questions about cloning, near a fabulous configuration of "Molecula" that glows eerily green. "Kekule's Dream" was inspired by the discoveries of a German chemist of that name, while the "molecular" chain of "Family Line" carries references to Reynolds' own. "Gravity" sounds scientific but has a beauty that's as arresting as innocence.
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| "Replicate," one of the works created by Brooklyn artist Jill Reynolds while she was in residence at the Pittsburgh Glass Center this year, is a humorous appearing commentary on a topical subject, cloning. PhotoCredit: Pittsburg Post-Gazette |
The overall effect is to show how cultural expectations precondition our reading of all components of our universe. That a viewer's life experience influences his or her interpretation of an artwork is a given in contemporary art dialogue. To claim that the reception -- even perhaps the structuring -- of a scientific principle may be culturally steered is a harder sell. Reynolds' presentation introduces the notion that absolute might not be as unmitigable as we think, and that categorical separations may be as arbitrary as racial classifications.
It's a good time to visit the center (see hours below) because classes have been suspended during torturously hot August and parking is readily available in its adjacent lot. Or, attend the free Hot Jam Open House from 6 to 9 p.m. Sept. 5 and see "Matter" along with glass blowing and flame-working demonstrations, snacks and entertainment.
"Matter" continues through Sept. 19 at 5472 Penn Ave. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays. Admission is free. For information: call 412-365-2145 or visit www.pittsburghglasscenter.org."
Thomas, M. "Art Review: 'Matter' is more proof that glass art matters." Pittsburg Post-Gazette. August 23, 2003. Accessed September 8, 2009. http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/20030823thomas0823p5.asp
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