2009 Michael Taylor

2009 Luke Strosnider:

"Without a doubt the most renowned glass artist of our time is Dale Chihuly, the enterprising Seattleite whose squiggly chandeliers, delicate floating orbs, and walk-through installations are the most familiar examples of "glass art." His work is ubiquitous, and love it or loath it (it's sometimes a challenge to appreciate an artist whose work is perceived as the sole representative of an entire medium), his pieces eloquently celebrate glass's dazzlingly colorful luminosity and beautiful rendering of organic form.

But there is far more to glass art than Chihuly's hegemony would have us believe, and Michael Taylor has done much to promote that point. Taylor, a pioneer of the medium and the former chair of the glass program at Rochester Institute of Technology, is the subject of Memorial Art Gallery's current exhibition, "A Unity of Opposites: Recent Work by Michael Taylor." On view are several pieces, the majority of which Taylor created within the last five months. What separates his recent work from what most of us would envision as glass art are drastic contrasts in both form and concept.

The formal differences are a matter of how the sculptures are made: unlike most well-known glass art, Taylor's work is not completed in a blazing hot furnace. Rather, he employs a technique known as "cold working," in which hunks of clear and colored glass are cut, ground, and polished. Taylor then joins the pieces with adhesive to create the final works. There are no sea creature-esque shapes here, no swirling flows of frozen liquid. Instead, Taylor's sculptures are assemblages of hard-edged polygons, still quite colorful and beautiful, but displaying an appreciation of geometric design and precision.

Most of the artworks in "A Unity of Opposites" sit calmly on tables and none feature moving parts, but the overwhelming sensation is one of rotation, turning, and movement through space. Despite its comparably diminutive size and lack of color, Taylor's sculpture "Wave" goes far to illuminate his conceptual practice. Shards of clear glass, held together with invisible glue, ever so vaguely attest to a human shape and bear a strong resemblance to the figure depicted in Marcel Duchamp's seminal painting "Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)." All of Taylor's work appears to depict serial movement via a motionless media, as if he began with geometric shapes, flung them through the air, photographed them, la Eadweard Muybridge, and then created his own sculptural interpretation of that process. Taylor's "Escalating Spiral" uses clear glass wedges with turquoise highlighting to give form to a swinging, swaying, barrel-roll motion, while "Candidate Sequences for CJ" presents us with a clear half-circle, outlined in citrus orange and heavy red, careening off into space and time.

Director of Exhibitions Marie Via's wall text alludes to Taylor's polymathic tendencies, stating "He's as interested in quantum physics as he is in beauty, as fascinated by the possibility of alternative universes as by engineering." We see this not only in Taylor's aesthetic, but also in the relationship of the sculptures to their titles. Moving around his "Helix or Boring a Conical Hole in the Darkness," the object shimmers: several wedges of clear glass fan out, resembling the motion of a corkscrew's burrowing. Vibrant red highlights glow where the glass wedges meet and, depending upon where you stand, the work's shape and color change completely. It's nearly flat when viewed from head-on; a crimson-ringed aperture made by three-dimensional triangles. But step to the side and it becomes an undulating, jagged form with slashes of hot color. Our visual sense delights, and - recalling the title - our mind considers the illuminating power of scientific knowledge.

Movement through the gallery animates the work, but there are a few pieces you can't circle completely; as such, they're less satisfying. "Meditative Algorithms" and "Entanglement Preservation in a Slow Medium" are mounted high on a wall, and both remain true to Taylor's stop-motion style and expressive use of color. They're pretty, pointy, shambolic tangles of pink, tangerine, yellow, and blue glass. But given that we can't walk around them, they're less responsive to our eyes. Stainless steel armature holds the rose, indigo, and multi-colored striped glass of the tall "Objective to Subjective." Strongly lit, its colors pleasantly grace nearby surfaces. Unfortunately the sculpture stands quite close to the wall, denying us a 360 degree interaction. Taylor's tabletop pieces invite us to play; limiting our perspective is like gifting a shiny new toy but insisting it remain in its box.

Talented glass artisans are many, and their output charms us with its mix of beauty and functionality. "Glass Wear," the gallery's accompanying exhibit of wearable and sculptural glass jewelry, proves that conclusively. But glass artists - those whose work explores heady concepts while simultaneously celebrating the uniqueness and beauty of materials - seem a much smaller group. Taylor's work is a long leap in a much different direction than that of popular preconceptions, and the results are just as fascinating visually, and even more thrilling intellectually.

A Unity of Opposites: Recent Work by Michael Taylor

Through June 28

Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave.

Wed-Sun 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Tue until 9 p.m. | $4-$10 | 276-8900"

Strosnider, L. "ART REVIEW: a unity of opposites: new work by Michael Taylor, through a glass brightly." City Newspaper. Rochester, . May 6, 2009. accessed October 5, 2009. http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/entertainment/art/2009/05/ART-REVIEW-A-Unity-of-Opposites/

2009 Shirley Dawson

"

Ref. to the Michael Taylor art review, I fear your writer misses some interesting points on the history of glass art in America and his dismissal of Dale Chihuly and his (reviewer's quotes)"glass art" is certainly a slap in Mr. Chihuly's less than deserving face!

The reviewer probably knows that Harvey Littleton was the singular "Johnny Appleseed" of the contemporary studio glass movement, traveling from college campus to college campus throughout the U.S. (early 1970's) illustrating how glass could be worked without the huge factory facilities considered up to that time to be a necessity. Harvey came to RIT and left behind a collection of primitive (by today's standards) glass pieces and sure enough, a few practitioners in his wake.
(An interesting aside, several of those young men - and at that time they were almost always male - hightailed it across the U.S.-Canadian border to escape being sent to Viet Nam and they became the teaching backbone of college art programs throughout Canada.)
But it was Dale Chihuly who "sold glass art." Any student who spent time at Pilchuck, the school he established in Seattle, will tell you that Chihuly spent hours nearly every day working the telephones, using every shred of charm and coercion he possessed to sell the IDEA of glass art to collectors, museum curators and gallery owners. Whether you like his art pieces or not - and many of us who snobbishly consider ourselves "critics", turn our noses up at the sometimes Las Vegas approach Chihuly brings to his art - must give him credit for the unbelievable job he's continued to do in the field. He not only sold the idea of collecting glass, but he is unbelievably generous sharing his expertise with students - an asset sometimes missing from teaching staff with less secure egos. He is directly responsible for the strong branding of Seattle as a glass art city - an association that brings thousands of visitors and millions of tourism dollars into that city every year.
These are not small accomplishments."

Dawson, S. May 9, 2009. Comment to above article.