2006 part five

Photo Credit: Jane Rosen

Slides 37 and 38 in "Bird Talk"given at Pilchuck Glass School May 28, 2008

http://janerosen.net/gallery/v/jane/exhibitions/bird+talk/bird+talk/Slide38.jpg.html 

2006 Matthew Kangas:

"This month's exhibitions at Friesen Gallery are timed to coincide with tonight's annual Pilchuck Glass School auction. Local glass fans and out-of-town collectors can judge the work of Jane Rosen and the health of the Stanwood school's 16-year-old emerging artists-in-residence program (EAiR). Rosen's show is strong; this year's EAiR is possibly the worst ever.

Some of Rosen's artworks are made of glass but most are mixed-media sculptures, paintings and drawings that evoke a lost or endangered world of nature and a fragmented, battered environment involving animal parts, bird wings and animal hooves.

With an echo of glass artist William Morris, Rosen (who recently retired from the University of California, Berkeley) is more muted and subtle. Her small painted-plaster plaques are homages to quail, deer and Chinese landscapes. They join larger watercolors like "Anatomy of a Horse" (2005), "Amber (Iris)" (2006) and "Birdseed" (2006), soft-focus nature studies of delicate and pale colors. The latter, especially, is indebted to Morris Graves with its faded-rice-paper appearance and filmy green background.

Rosen's sculptures seem stronger statements. "Marble Wing" (2006) is a carved wing shape that confounds our expectations of soft feathers, here executed in hard Portuguese marble. "Oh Deer" (2005) is a wall-mounted effigy of a deer without legs, smothered in a marble-dust paste. Even more satisfying, "Feet Herd" (2006) is six free-standing animal hooves averaging 7 feet high. They are echoes of a beautiful drawing hanging nearby, "Feet First" (2005).

Best of all, six cast-glass bear and seal or sea-lion heads each juts out from the wall with considerable mystery and power. Done during Rosen's own Pilchuck residency, they prove once again how important it is for artists working in other materials to come to Pilchuck and try out glass. For Rosen, 56, the results are quietly spectacular.

The EAiR program has an illustrious past but seems in crisis now. Subject of an elaborate Tacoma Art Museum survey in 2000 with a lavish catalog, the program's recent shows, hosted by Friesen and other galleries over the years, have been a letdown. Since Friesen has two separate storefront spaces in the Washington Mutual Tower, the Rosen show should have been in the larger of the two. The six women from Pilchuck could barely fill half of the bigger space.

The emerging artists in residence focus on experimental work while at Pilchuck but this does not always translate into a gallery setting. For example, gallery owner Andria Friesen mentioned that more than 25 percent of the work sent was broken in shipment or otherwise unexhibitable. Pilchuck co-directors Pike Powers and Ruth King should help the artists with basic professional practices or junk the whole gallery showcase idea.

Exhibit review


"Jane Rosen: Tracking" and "Pilchuck Glass School: 16th Year of Emerging Artists-in-Resident," 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays, through Oct. 25, Friesen Gallery, 1200 Second Ave., Seattle (206-628-9501 or www.friesengallery.com). 

Selected by a jury of eight, there may be too many cooks spoiling the broth. No male artists have been selected since 2003. One artist, Jenny Heishman, simply sent three works that had already been seen this summer in another local gallery a few blocks away. The most talented of the group, Heishman was a big disappointment.

To be fair, there are bits and pieces that may lead to something. Pat Bako's colorful large pâte-de-verre bowls are charming. Rachel Moore's six cast-glass outstretched hands cry out for a larger installation: there should have been dozens. Perhaps influenced by Moore, Cara Meling cast 16 glass half-feet — toes and insteps only — and propped them up on a pedestal, like corpses on a slab. Taguchi's "Sky Mountain" (2005) is the photo-document of her glass house project at Pilchuck. Why couldn't we have the house instead of the color photograph?

One final fear: Are the EAiR artists chosen examples of how talented younger artists are losing interest in glass? Instead of a thriving, emerging future, they may instead be signs of the beginning of the end."

Kangas, M. "End of an Era? A Pilchuck veteran outshines emerging artists" October 13, 2006.  The Seattle Times. accessed April 2, 2010.    http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2003301516_visart13.html

2006 Mike Madison:

"This story in today's NYT about Seattle glass sculptor/industrialist Dale Chihuly only scratches the surface of the bitterness that surrounds his dealings with some members of the arts community.
The case sounds like another “can you copyright nature” kind of claim, but it seems more accurate to say that the case involves whether the plaintiff really owns what the plaintiff claims he owns — since he never, actually, made any of the glass sculptures involved. According to the Times:

He acknowledges that he has not blown glass for 27 years, dating from a surfing accident that cost him the full range of shoulder motion, an injury that struck three years after he had lost sight in his left eye in a traffic accident.
Still, Mr. Chihuly said, he works with sketches, faxes and through exhortation. Nothing with his name on it ever came from anyone but himself, he said.

Did that “exhortation” amount to “authorship” for copyright purposes? Or does the defendant — who blew glass under the plaintiff’s supervision — have his own “authorial” interests at stake? Take a look at this exhibit: a fax from the plaintiff to the defendant that communicates some sketches — and adds, “Here’s a little sketch but make whatever you want.” At the least, this sounds to me like the defendant has a plausible claim of joint authorship with respect to at least some of the plaintiff’s works. And the style of those works in general may be a product of the defendant as much as it is of Chihuly. If that’s right, then the defendant isn’t liable for copying — himself. If style can be owned, and if you own your style, then you’re allowed to express yourself. Just ask John Fogerty."

Madison, M.  "Chihuly Glass Sculpture." Madison.net: law, technology, society.  Accessed June 2, 2010.  Dates: June 1st, 2006.  http://madisonian.net/archives/2006/06/01/chihuly-glass-sculpture/

1997 part two

In this time line I pull quotes to illustrate a thread in popular and scholarly writing and criticism about glass. Here we will see current glass artists defending their art against the accusations and separating themselves from these stereotypes and, hopefully, find out how and where now-common opinion is born.

1997 Interior Design magazine:
"

This year the biannual international exposition Sculpture, Objects & Functional Art Chicago 1997, also known as SOFA, will take place concurrently with the Chicago Design Show, October 17th through 19th, at Navy Pier's Festival Hall. The four-year-old show offers contemporary three-dimensional art objects, from sculpture to furniture, straddling the line between the two often disparate fields. As of press time, 92 galleries; mainly from the U.S. but also from a variety of foreign countries, will show the work of nearly 1,000 represented artists and studio designers worldwide. Media and objects include fiber art, ceramics, wood and metal furniture, and jewelry.

During the show there will be a variety of symposia on numerous topics including "The Business of Art Furnishings." The Pilchuck Glass School and other institutions will host panel discussions; many artists, curators and dealers are scheduled to speak.

Exhibitions will include "A Collector's Home Office" curated by Chicago art dealer Ann Nathan. Wendell Castle will design a special "Office of the CEO" at the booth of Leo Kaplan Modern. The International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University will mount a solo show of enormous vessels by Ted Randall, in memory of the late artist. "Made in Brooklyn" comprises another show, sponsored by UrbanGlass: New York Center for Contemporary Glass, featuring the work of artists and teachers at the 20-year-old Brooklyn facility.

SOFA will also host an exhibition of contemporary Australian ceramic art. The public spaces will house a large-scale glass sculpture by Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova, the team of glass artists from the Czech Republic credited with starting the contemporary studio glass movement in Europe."

"SOFA Chicago. (Sculpture, Objects and Furniture Art Chicago 1997)." Interior Design. Aug 1, 1997. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-20045179/sofa-chicago-sculpture-objects.html

1997 Grace Glueck:

"Glass, the only art medium that seems to function as a movement in itself, is the subject of a four-person show at the American Craft Museum. But this one is billed as pushing glass work beyond the making of unique objects. ''Four Acts in Glass: Installations by Chihuly, Morris, Powers and Vallien'' is meant, a wall label says, to ''challenge our conception of the relationship of glass to its surroundings and define anew the dynamics between glass and the viewer.''

Each of the artists -- Dale Chihuly, William Morris, Pike Powers and Bertil Vallien -- has been given a good-size arena in which to achieve this effect. But in this very mixed offering, not all of the work lives up to the mandate. Some of it amounts, instead, to a demonstration of how unique glass objects can be deployed to fill a good deal of space.

The most arresting object is Mr. Chihuly's ''Tower of Tobias,'' rising in the museum's atrium, a flamboyant, almost floor-to-ceiling glass tree that thrusts out myriad leaves of snaky glass ampules in transparent white and blue. In good time for the holidays, its theatrical radiance is in the spirit of the majestic Christmas spruce now installed at Rockefeller Center. But artists who truly use glass to transform or alter space, like the architectural glassmaker James Carpenter (represented here by a single small neon piece made in 1971 as a collaboration with Mr. Chihuly) are curiously missing.

There are other Chihulys, certainly no hardship to look at. A long display case sets out an overview of his works from 1965 to the present: vases, bowls, nested vessels, bottles, cylinders, roundels, baskets. Many show the artist's greatest gift, a masterly skill at coaxing glass into robust yet delicate seashell and floral effusions and tinting them to dazzling effect.

Two stunning large-scale sets on separate display are composed of lyrical, petal-like vessels nested within one another. And the walls resonate with Mr. Chihuly's drawings, exuberant abstract bursts of line and color. They are less impressive, however, than his work in the round. It's the tower of glass that leaves Mr. Chihuly's imprint on the show and marks its high point, literally as well as figuratively.

The major piece by the Swedish glass designer Bertil Vallien is a regiment of cast-glass heads, each mounted on a narrow pedestal slightly above eye level. The highly stylized heads, in white or cobalt blue, evoke classical Roman portraiture and are often inflected by cuts or niches housing tiny embellishments. For instance, a green copper grille is set into ''Head No. 9,'' screening the tiny figure of a man. ''Head No. 11'' is stuck all over with nails, its mouth twisted in a gruesome smile. Yet another head is studded with knobs for hair; a tiny viperish tongue darts from a corner of its mouth.

The Vallien installation, which viewers enter through a boxlike structure of Cor-Ten steel that suggests a void, was inspired by the story of a 13-year old Swedish schoolgirl who hit her head when she slipped on ice in 1876. She lapsed into a trancelike sleep that lasted 32 years.

Awakening at age 45, all she could remember was ''a great darkness and blue men.'' But there is something too rigid and stagey about Mr. Vallien's attempt, in these clever designerish heads, to evoke the men of her long unconsciousness. You see his skill, but not her nightmare.

With virtuosic technical know-how, William Morris makes artifacts of blown glass that simulate animal skulls, prehistoric vessels, ancient sculptures, bones and the like. He arranges them in grid form on panels that range up to the scale of a room-size wall. The biggest, ''Large Grid,'' contains no fewer than 292 small pieces, roughly the same size: tiny shards of pottery, animals, birds and bits thereof, bone fragments, tools, shells and other prehistoric minutiae. The color range is from bright red to worn old clay.

In another panel, 12 horned or antlered animal skulls project from the surface, with one or another head accompanied by, say, a merrily perching bird or a wraparound lizard. A third, ''Horse Panel,'' displays painted pottery horses that are worn, cracked and eroded as if dug up from an ancient barrow. All, of course, are made of glass. Set out in orderly ranks, this archeological display is a beautifully poetic evocation of bygone creatures and cultures, but it hardly defines anew the dynamics between glass and the viewer.

Pike Powers, the artistic director of the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Wash., of which Mr. Chihuly is a co-founder, contributes the least of these installations. Her ''Coney Island'' series of sideshows, arranged in booths, was inspired by a visit to the old Brooklyn site (and maybe by the work of Diane Arbus). She portrays freaks, street hawkers and carnival attractions in small oil paintings and sculptures entrapped in bottles and bell jars. One sideshow, for instance, called ''Twinisms,'' includes a two-headed baby in a bottle, a two-headed rabbit in a bell jar, and a painting titled ''Siamese Twins Connected at the Genitals.''

The truly squeamish can turn their attention to more moderate entertainments, like ''Whaling Museum,'' a display of sea creatures and salty characters in bottles along with a painting of a mermaid and a church steeple going under water, titled ''Losing Faith.'' The cutesy faux naivete that pervades this installation sets the teeth on edge. If it has anything to do with pushing the envelope of glass, pardon the mixed metaphor, I'll be a bell jar.

''Four Acts in Glass: Installations by Chihuly, Morris, Powers and Vallien'' remains at the American Craft Museum, 40 West 53d Street, Manhattan, through Jan. 18."

Glueck, G. "ART REVIEW; Installations of glass that try to shatter conceptions." The New York Times. November 21, 1997. Accessed September 14, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/21/arts/art-review-installations-of-glass-that-try-to-shatter-conceptions.html