2003 Mark Fefer:
"FRIDAY
VISUAL ARTS
Gas, Cash Or Glass
Does glass art make you blow chunks? Well, be warned right now: You're going to be seeing a ton of it this month, as the annual meeting of the Glass Art Society brings over 1,500 artists and collectors to Seattle. There's gonna be glass everywhere. And Roq la Rue, like a few other alternative spaces, is planning to crash the party in its own distinctive fashion in Roq's case, showing glass artists with more of a kitsch, comic, and tattoo point of view (like former Pilchuck and Pratt students Kelly and Nanda Soderberg, whose Be Mine is seen above). Hey kids, don't throw stones; come to Roq's house instead. Opening reception: 6-10 p.m. Fri., June 6. Roq la Rue Gallery, 2316 Second Ave., 206-374-8977. MARK D. FEFER "
Fefer, M. "Gas, Cash or Glass". Seattle Weekly. June 4, 2003. website accessed July 1, 2009. http://www.seattleweekly.com/2003-06-04/arts/june-411
2003 Emily Hall:
"Sometimes in order to see the art you want to see you have to start your own gallery. This is a pretty drastic measure, of course, but it is what Ragan Peck has done.
"There were all these artists I knew whose work I liked," she told me, "but they had no venues to show it. There aren't enough places like SOIL and the Pound"--and now, of course, the Pound has closed. Priceless Works, the gallery that arose out of this frustration, is not a cooperative, but it has a distinct alternative-space feel: a series of linked rooms on the ground floor of a newish Fremont building that's not particularly easy to find (the gallery entrance is in the alley between North 34th and 35th Streets, and Evanston and Fremont Avenues--the address isn't much help). When I visited the gallery recently, the rooms had been painted the bright, slightly acidy green, pink, and yellow of a Peter Max poster--quite a departure from the venerable and ultrarespectable Elliott Brown Gallery (now open online only), which once occupied the space.
Peck mounted her first show last April, with the intent to borrow the space until it could be leased. Then she decided not to become yet another artist brightening up a space for prospective tenants, and she took the lease herself. The gallery's aesthetic is evolving but distinct, and it has a kind of urgency about it, as though tilted toward a kind of work that Peck wanted to see but wasn't seeing. The August show featured three artists whose work drew freely from cartoons and graphic design as well as more traditional fine- art forms. It's a little like Kirsten Anderson's excellent Roq la Rue, although without the lowbrow slant; like Roq la Rue, and like Bluebottle on Capitol Hill, Priceless Works has what might be called a gift shop, full of extraordinarily tempting items made by artists. (I'll be back for the "dangerbunny" underpants.)
Peck, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, studied sculpture and glass art, and has gone through the paces of a glass-blowing career, with stints at the Pilchuck Glass School and working for someone who worked for Chihuly. Her pedigree seems to make her open to artists who do more than one thing, who freely jump from medium to medium, as well as to young artists who are in the process of figuring out what kind of work they want to make. This is a risky proposition--there's a reason galleries wait for artists to develop--but Peck handles it with a great deal of respect and charm. Devi Pellerin, an artist in her early 20s, was represented last month by a handful of paintings, some glass vessels, and a small army of little sewn bunnies that put one in mind of voodoo dolls (Pellerin is the originator of dangerbunny). Some of Pellerin's paintings were clearly better than others, but there is something to be said for seeing an artist find her feet. By the time you get to the paintings inhabited by rabbits, collage, and traditional Japanese elements (the game of go, kimonos, cherry blossoms), you've seen an idea hatched, explored, and developed.
August's show also featured Zoe Dawn Wilson's deft, furious paintings on paper, in which certain images repeated insistently: a skull, a remarkable hunched-over vulture, a buzzard with a long, naked neck. (I had to admire the way Wilson protected the opacity of these personal symbols--she declined to provide any sort of artist's statement, and none of the work was titled; it was impossible not to think of Basquiat and his crown, a kind of frantic waving gesture from the artist to the world.) And finally, there were enormous and fantastical papier-mache garden animals, in searing colors that complemented the walls, by Francesca Berrini (who had some torturously cut-up and amazingly reassembled maps in SOIL's Speak 'N' Spell a few months ago).
For now, Priceless Works is open only on weekends while Peck makes a living as a freelance glass blower. "But I'm thinking," she said, "of putting an end to that." "
Hall, E. "OUT OF FRUSTRATION: The Priceless Works Gallery Springs Forth from Fremont." The Stranger. September 10, 2003. Located on the Priceless Works Gallery Website, accessed June 4, 2009. http://www.pricelessworksgallery.com/press091003.html
2003 Sheila Farr:
"A few weeks ago at Kane Hall, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl had the guts to proclaim blasphemy. In response to a question from the audience, Schjeldahl firmly stated that he can't stand glass art. Then — smart man — he got out of town.
As everybody knows, Western Washington is glass-art mecca. With the Glass Art Society conference in town last week, many of the local galleries — from conservative to off-the-wall — got swept into its wake with glass exhibitions that run through the end of the month. There's plenty of Venetian and Chihuly-inspired stuff for those who want it, but the most fun to be had is in the unforeseen offshoots of the glass movement. I'll bet if Schjeldahl had stuck around, even he would have found something to love (the dominatrix shoes at Roq la Rue, for example).
I tend to be a cynic about glass, but I made the rounds and came up with some pleasant surprises. One thing I noticed was a trend toward theme shows — one way of standing apart from the crowd. Solomon Fine Arts (1215 First Ave., Seattle; 206-297-1400) stuck with black-and-white objects in a collaborative show by painter Julia Ricketts and glass sculptor Nancy Callan (the work was otherwise unexceptional). A group show at Friesen Gallery (1210 Second Ave., Seattle; 206-628-9501) focused on clear glass — no color allowed.
That's where I encountered the work of California sculptor Paul DiPasqua, whose nifty assemblages of found-glass objects made me laugh. He must have had a great time gathering the material for these oddly elegant sculptures...""Gallery surprises prove glass art is (sometimes) all it's cracked up to be". Farr, S. The Seattle Times. June 20, 2003. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20030620&slug=visart20
2003 Emily Hall:
"So much so that for the authentic Seattle touch, the set of the television show Frasier features a Chihuly sculpture. But the disdain for glass is not just sour grapes; it also has something to do with how easy glass is. Much has been made of the roots of the studio glass movement, in which glass transcended craft and became art, but it often seems that this is simply a case of the rigorousness of method being confused with complexity of thought. (It's true that glass blowing is intense, and fun to watch. Institutions like Tacoma's Museum of Glass have turned the hot shop into a performance arena, as important as the galleries.) There is a sentimentality that attaches itself to glass, the kind of thing that is approached by earthy "lyrical" writing, of the fused-in-fire and born-of-breath sort. Glass is also pretty; and pretty plus sentimental almost never makes interesting (let alone great) art.
The great glass artists seem to be artists who happen to work in glass, like Josiah McElheny--artists who tend to think carefully about why one medium is used instead of another (the opposite is a case of nursing too-reverent feelings about any one medium in particular). In three unusual glass shows--put out in conjunction with thousands of people arriving for the Glass Art Society conference in town this month--there's a little rebellious streak, distinctly anti-reverent, that bodes pretty well for leveraging glass out of its decorative rut...
Oddly enough, some of that work is in a Pilchuck School exhibition; Pilchuck, of course, was cofounded by Dale Chihuly, but it seems that artists are managing to think around him. Stuart Keeler's stacked pile of wood pallets topped with a cast-glass pallet has an ugly-duckling quality: ugly because it's useless compared to the others; swanlike because it's an unexpected object of contemplation. A series of glass bells by Timothy Ringsmuth contain Victorian-style hair sculptures, twisted into loosely botanical shapes; glass, of course, is a protective medium for living things as well as for memento mori. The bells and the crystal pedestals are also handmade, perhaps as much a part of an intricate mourning process, as the elaborately twined hair.
...Much of the work in Not Art Glass refers to the ruts that glass finds itself in--precious container, decorative object--and posits an alternative kind of art, in which the fetish aura around the object is cleared away in favor of the object itself. It doesn't always work, but at least there are artists asking the right question, which in this case is not how glass, but why?"
Hall, E. "Glass My Ass: Emily Hall Tries to Overcome Her Loathing of Glass Trinkets" From the Jun 19 – Jun 25, 2003 issue of The Stranger, Seattle, WA. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/glass-my-ass/Content?oid=14670
Accessed March 23, 2009.
2003 William Warmus:
"Despite the attractions of plurarlism, some key artists using glass remain unapologetic formalists who insist on beginning and ending with the art object. They seek to create sculptures that exhibit clearly articulated boundaries and that indulge integrity of form. The goal is to make something truly beautiful in an old-fashioned way, and to tempt age-old desires: the eye’s delight in color, the hand’s hunger for rich texture. Some of this work is not afraid to appear costly and elitist. And though some of it is brittle, even fragile, it is also defiant and purposefully difficult….
…Formalist art is all about this challenge of appreciating and experiencing a definite object in alll its lonely perfection. Formalists are the curmudgeons of the art world,but they can be endearing curmudgeons.”
"Fire and Form." by William Warmus. Published by Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach Florida, 2003. p. 11
2003 Stephen Kinzer:
"When the Museum of Glass opened in a striking cone-shaped building here last summer, many people in Tacoma took it as a symbol of this city's rebirth. Long considered a gritty and drab stepsister to sophisticated Seattle, 30 miles to the north, Tacoma is becoming chic, with boutiques and cafes lining waterfront blocks that were ugly and crime-ridden just a few years ago.
The opening of this museum also reflects a growing recognition that glassmaking and other pursuits traditionally dismissed as crafts have reached a level of artistic quality. An exhibition now at the Museum of Glass reflects the rising ambitions of many glassmakers, ceramic artists, woodworkers, metalsmiths, fabric creators and others who work in fields once considered by critics and curators as mere artisanry. This show focuses on the work of the Swedish-born Bertil Vallien, who uses sand, embedded masks and figurines, and other techniques in his glass sculptures.
Although this museum is formally known as the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art, it does not use terms like glass artist or glass art. ''That tends to be a way to marginalize the work, the same thing that happens when you say black artists or female artists,'' said the museum's director, Josi Callan. ''We consider ourselves a contemporary art museum with a focus on glass but an interest in the broader artistic context. There's no question we're breaking new ground, and we sense a great public interest in what we're doing.
''Over the last 10 years,'' she added, ''glass has really been coming into its own as a fine-arts medium. We're where photography was 20 years ago. More museums are adding glass works to their permanent collections. It's part of this broadening view of what constitutes fine art.''
One reason that glass has made the jump from being perceived as craft to being perceived as art is the work of Dale Chihuly, who critics say pushed the boundaries of glassworking and, in his sculpture, blurred the line between decorative and fine art. Mr. Chihuly, who was born in Tacoma, has work in hundreds of public and private collections around the world, displayed everywhere from museums to restaurants and casinos.
The Museum of Glass was originally envisioned as a place where Mr. Chihuly could show his own work, but now the museum features rotating shows, although two permanent installations by Mr. Chihuly decorate a bridge that leads to the entrance.
''Boundaries between artists and craftsmen have melded considerably since the 1960's, when I began exhibiting,'' Mr. Chihuly said. ''Now people use the materials that suit the ideas they want to express.''
The line separating art from craft has always been subjectively drawn. Sometimes the difference was said to be in intent, art created solely for its own sake while crafted objects were meant to be useful. At other times the medium has been considered the key difference. Oil painting, for example, was automatically considered an artist's medium, and works in fabric, wood or clay consigned to lesser talents.
In recent years, however, glassmakers seem to have succeeded in changing the public's perception of what they do. Those working in other mediums view the glassmakers' success with a mixture of admiration and envy.
''The glass people are definitely ahead of us,'' said James A. Wallace, director of the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, which exhibits works ranging from jewelry to monumental sculpture. ''They did it right. They never sold cheap, and they very consciously nurtured the image of being artists rather than craftspeople.''
But Mr. Wallace said that the rising quality of metalwork, woodwork and ceramics had led many art lovers and critics to shift their perceptions. ''Since the beginning of art history, crafts have been considered minor arts, the bastard child left out on the street corner,'' he said. ''Just in the last few years I've seen that stereotype really start to change. We're moving into the artistic mainstream.''
Recent exhibitions at the metal museum reflect this move. One show featured strikingly original jars, vases and incense burners by Harlan W. Butt, whose work is collected by mainstream museums like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Some curators consider the word craft a negative term and seek to avoid it. Last year the American Craft Museum in New York changed its name to the Museum of Arts and Design.
David Revere McFadden, that museum's chief curator, explained: ''We did a lot of consultation and work with focus groups, and when we asked them what craft means, they came up with reactions like handiwork, busy work, rural, nonprofessional, folk art, humble, brown and scratchy, macramé plant hangers. There's been such an eroding of the traditional borders between various fields that we decided it was a mistake to keep using that word.''
''Since we announced the change,'' he said, ''we've had a tremendous positive response from artists. They tell us that they've always considered themselves artists.''
Not every museum that features craft-based art, however, is running from the word. The Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte, N.C., continues to embrace it. ''There is a misperception of what the word craft really means,'' said Mark Richard Leach, who until recently was the museum's director. ''Many people link it to handicrafts and think of hooked rugs or paint-by-number projects. We've failed to brand the word properly.
''Our goal is to train and sensitize the unfamiliar eye to distinguish the fine line that delineates where intent, skill, experience and outcome conspire to transcend hobby,'' Mr. Leach said. ''This is where craft assumes a different order of meaning and begins to exemplify a fundamental human impulse to manipulate materials into objects of utility, beauty or contemplation.
''I hope,'' he added, ''that a newly educated and admiring public will demand use of the word craft as a measure of respect for that impulse.''"
"The Luster of Glass Joins Art's Mainstream; Works Once Dismissed as Crafts Enjoy a New Level of Respect" By STEPHEN KINZER Published: Monday, April 28, 2003 The New York Times. Accessed April 26, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/28/arts/luster-glass-joins-art-s-mainstream-works-once-dismissed-crafts-enjoy-new-level.html?scp=14&sq=glass%20art&st=cse
2003 National Endowment for the Arts:"Pilchuck Glass School
Seattle, WA
$25,000
To support planning and implementation of a summer artists residency program. Artists will be provided with time, resources, facilities and technical assistance on Pilchuck's campus."
National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Grants 2003. http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/disciplines/Visualarts/03visual.html
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