how is this glass?

PostGlass Video Festival will be screened at GAS Conference 2011

2011-05-23T15:28:00.009-04:00

We are very excited to announce that the Post-Glass Video Festival will be presented at Glass Art Society(GAS) Annual Conference in Seattle, WA this coming June. The Post-Glass Video Festival will be screened as a part of Glass Theater.

Glass Theater at GAS Conference

Venue: Washington State Convention Center, 4C-1

Hours: 8am-5pm, Friday and Saturday, June 3 and 4

Screening time for Post-Glass Video Festival

6/3(Fri) 8am

6/4(Sat) 9am

Other featured films include:

A Not So Still Life - a documentary on the life and work of artist Ginny Ruffner

The Space of Light - a documentary on the life and work of Jaroslava Brychtova

Chifuly at the Salk, Chifuly Fire & Light

I was Dreaming of Spirit Animals - Cappy Thompson's film

Glass Art Society Annual Conference 2011

Date: 6/1(Wed)-6/5(Sun), 2011

Location: Seattle, WA, USA multiple venues in downtown area

To find more information about the conference, please visit GAS website:

http://www.glassart.org/2011_Seattle_WA.html

Deadline extended for "Call for Curators"

2011-02-14T20:42:00.002-05:00

The submission deadline for "Call for Curators" is extended until March 1st, 2011.

For more information and guideline, please see the previous post:

http://howisthisglass.blogspot.com/2010/12/call-for-curators.html

Call For Conversation

2011-02-14T20:37:00.002-05:00

Call For Conversation

Deadline: ongoing

h o w i s t h i s g l a s s ? project offers a platform for post-glass artists to share and exchange ideas

about their studio practices through constructive dialogues. We look for information about existing work or project you're currently working on. The outcome of the "conversation" will vary, such as featuring your work on our blog, or providing feedback to help developing your project.

To get involved:

Please contact us via email: yukanjali@gmail.com.

Indicate "call for conversation" on the subject line.

Make sure to provide brief information including the following:

*How you heard about "how is this glass?"

*Your artistic background

*How you see your work related to "post-glass" ism

*Your work information. This could be link to your website, online video, jpeg images as attachment etc. If you are submitting work in progress, please specify what kind of interaction you expect from the conversation.

The entries will be reviewed on rolling basis, and we will contact you to follow up.

Post-Glass Video Festival at Ausglass . Sydney College of Art

2011-01-30T10:41:00.005-05:00

The Post-Glass Video Festival was screened at the Sydney College of Art during Peripheral Visions, the Ausglass conference, from Jan 20-23, 2011. Even though the video installations were unable to travel down under, the largest component of the festival, its single channel video loop, was well-received by the audience - conference attendees who spanned the gamut of artists, curators, students, collectors, gallerists and educators. The sensitivity, intelligence and fresh eyes of the artists did not go unnoticed: the diversity in vocabulary, content and insight provided by the works were appreciated and evoked strong responses from many who we met.

The screening was accompanied by the festival's catalogs as well as a lecture and Q&A session. The latter focussed on post-glass-ism, the 4 themes emerging across various works in the video festival and the future of the howisthisglass project, especially with regards to creating opportunities for artists. The festival in this way, created a valuable platform, to host a much-needed conversation.

There is a possibility that the festival will return to the city at a new venue later this year but for now, at the request of several blog followers and artists, here are some pictures of the venue and the gallery. We will post details pertaining to specific conversations that emerged at this conference soon.

PGVF@ AUS Glass Conference 20-23 Jan. 2011

2011-01-19T23:18:00.003-05:00

We're excited to announce that The Post-Glass Video Festival is now presented in Australia.

The screenings of the video will be held at Sydney College of the Arts throughout the duration of AUS Glass Conference 2011.

For more information, please visit AUS Glass website:

http://www.peripheralvision.org.au/the-post-glass-video-festival.html

HYPEROPIA PROJECTS

2011-01-18T02:53:00.009-05:00

Hyperopia Project is a collaborative team comprised of artists Helen Lee, Alexander Rosenberg, and Matthew Szösz. Though being educated in a material-specific program, their multi-disciplinary art practices do not comfortably fit into one genre. Glass is a material they all have in common, but rathe than using well-established glass art vocabularies they venture to experiment with a state of "superposition" for opening up new possibilities of glass in the contemporary art world at large.

Hyperopia Project has recently launched an open call for a group exhibit, Superposition which will be hosted by the Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle in June 2011. More information can be viewed on their project's website.

http://hyperopiaprojects.com/index.html

CALL FOR CURATORS

2010-12-14T23:32:00.002-05:00

Call For Curators
Deadline to submit proposal : Jan 31, 2011
Format and timeline : variable

h o w i s t h i s g l a s s ? is an ongoing initiative that identifies and profiles new,alternative ways of working with glass. Thus far, the project’s blog and exhibition series have successfully highlighted works by post-glass artists;
ventures that speak about glass using vocabularies unexpected in the studio glass tradition : guerilla intervention, performance, digital technology. Still a nebulous trend in the contemporary glass art scene, our efforts aim to sustain this attention as the number of post-glass artists is growing.

In pursuit of active discussions about post-glass-ism, we invite curators who are interested in studying and furthering its scope. We hope to democratize the voice of post-glass, whose expanded definition and implications will be formed by the submissions received, through a network of peer voices rather than a single proprietary or critical authority. We see the curator as a “content specialist”, someone who establishes and develops information based on observation, insight and research. We are seeking innovative and critical perspectives on the phenomenology, materiality or social/personal experience of glass. Your concept must stem from either the direct (non-)experience of glass or an active investigation of specific issues and cultural connotations. In all cases, the research must call for and be manifest only through a new articulation.

For example, you may wish to record evidence of post-glass experiments hidden within conventional studio glass over the past 50 years. Perhaps you envision an exhibition that features conceptual work made by the intense pursuits of material-based artists. Maybe you feel strongly about redefining the notion of craftsmanship in light of emergent, interactive technologies. Performative acts based on the phenomena of light may be of interest to you. Or perhaps you wish to scour popular literature and lyrics to assimilate a rich dictionary of cultural metaphors associated with glass.

The topic of interest lies wide open as evident above. The expression of your research may be varied: an exhibition, a publication, a forum, a film, audio recordings, or other public events.... The outcome may be unique, insightful, critical,poetic or entertaining. You need not be a glass artist or curator to submit. If your investigation explores the main premise of the the post-glass initiative, we would like to hear from you. In turn, we offer h o w i s t h i s g l a s s ? as an open source platform for bringing attention to wider post-glass ideas.

To submit:
Please email yukanjali@gmail.com with a letter of interest that introduces your project. In the main body of the email, include a brief outline (up to 250 words) of your proposal : intent, concept, nature of working relationship being sought and outcome. Do not forget to list full contact information at the bottom of your email.
As attachments (pdf or doc), please describe the proposed research in greater detail - content, components, timeline, funding, methodology and outcomes. Basically, tell us what you envision the project as and how you intend to make it happen. Please include your resume. You may also attach media as needed, less than 10MB. Please label all attachments as follows: yourlastname_mediatype_number.fileformat (eg.genius_video_03.mov for the third movie clip sent by Jane Genius in support of her proposal).
Please note that as the initiator, you will be responsible for the vision, funding and execution of your proposed project. We provide the springboard, an umbrella of peer support and attention, and will contact you to discuss the possibilities and exact terms of a formal relationship with h o w i s t h i s g l a s s ? depending on the nature of your project.

Atta Kim: Parthenon for 96 Hours

2010-11-27T00:13:00.005-05:00

Installations in the gallery

2010-09-19T01:29:00.001-04:00

Brett Swenson "Dreamcast"

Installations in the gallery

2010-09-19T01:26:00.003-04:00

Arun Sharma "(de)composition:self portrait"

Installations in the gallery

2010-09-19T01:22:00.003-04:00

Sarah Rose Allen "cup"

Installations in the gallery

2010-09-19T01:10:00.003-04:00

Charlotte Potter "The Opposite of Mitosis"

Installations in the gallery

2010-09-19T01:00:00.006-04:00

Netta Bacon "Pack"

The Post Glass Video Festival opens at Heller Gallery

2010-09-16T20:18:00.014-04:00

[Theme] On Breaking :

2010-09-10T13:39:00.005-04:00

Post-glass artists appear to be enjoying broken glass. They undertake tasks to either break glass or make from a destroyed object. In doing so, they challenge certain fundamental notions about object-hood and our interactions therewith :

* When an object breaks, it has failed. Glass is termed fragile, and often shied away from, for this reason. * We are particularly fearful of broken glass, as it cuts deep, silently. The sound and sight of glass - crunching, shattering, grinding, imploding - is disconcerting to most people and reminds them of the dangers posed. * Breaking things is not acceptable, socially. Considered the projection of either inattentive or self-destructive human nature onto an object, surface, person or external situation, the gesture is frowned upon, if not punished. Breaking is a sign of aggression or clumsiness.

The urge for post-glass artists to work with broken glass may stem from the desire to :
* Transcend the static, pristine and cold nature of the finished object (as is customary in studio glass history) by using it (the object) as a starting point for making. * Focus on properties of the material instead of creation of a form. And finding new form from that process. * Partake in the politics and associations that the act of breaking brings about in a way that conventional glass culture does not.

There is an interest to engage moments that vanish quickly in the self-containment of glass objects. The act of destroying the object is a gesture that has no creative place in studio glass even though it is an integral part of the making process. Since video has the ability to capture such moments accurately, a number of artists, many featured on this blog, are using video to focus on the breakable nature of glass.

For example, a part of The Post-Glass Video Festival, Alana Kakoyiannis's Untitled cloaks the aggression that is needed to break a Pyrex dish in a sink. And when confronted with a shattered object the viewer is forced, rudely, to comprehend and reconstruct in her mind, the undisputed presence of that force.

Kimberly McKinnis tests the viewer's endurance of aggression that assumes the form of slow, non-vocal and painstaking destruction. The incessant grinding of glass against harsh concrete in Untitled: The Shape of an Emotion II as a beer bottle is transformed to dust is reminiscent of someone grinding their teeth in pain.

Brett Swenson's Execution begins a game of expectancy with the viewer as bullets of heat impact a clear glass surface : At what point will the glass break? What happens to the man behind the glass when it breaks?

Unlike these other works that exploit our perception of "breaking" to tell their story, Giuseppe Di Bella's puzzle-like reconstruction of a broken milk bottle in Healing reverses the object's fate and in turn, assimilates a space within which the viewer can reflect. His gesture in the video is one of tender care - patient, calm and painstaking. It speaks of catharsis.

In ways such as the above, but not limited to, post-glass artists ask : Hot glass forms, Cold glass breaks. Why not engage it? And in turn, they are seeking meaning in the destruction of a glass object.

[Theme] Of Body and Performance :

2010-09-10T13:34:00.003-04:00

Post-Glass artists seem to be using their bodies to create works in which performative acts create intimate relationships with the physicality or metaphor of glass. This is yet another outcome of the interest to engage moments that vanish quickly in the self-containment of objects. Since video has the ability to capture such moments accurately, an intense questioning of the human body in relation to glass spills over to experiments of process in video as seen amongst artists who are part of The Post-Glass Video Festival 2010.

In The Only Thing You Can Count On Is Your Family, Andrew Salgado uses the metaphorical space of the mirror to reflect an image of the Other or monstrous. In a narrative that is very personal, and before our eyes, he transforms from what is socially and familially acceptable to what is not, what is questionable, alienated, disapproved and perhaps despised by some. By applying changes to his own body, the Other is revealed as but one of two sides of the same coin, the coin being the Self.

(de)composition: self-portrait is a meditative and profound consideration in which Arun Sharma observes the slow erosion of the human body into a haze of dust. Destruction of the substance of an earthen human form causes its surroundings, water in the box, to be full of the substance.The firmness rendered by the opacity of the medium means the absence of an object within it. Through a visual representation of the breakdown of the human form, Sharma's questions run deep : How does entropy occur in a human body? Does the invisibility mean that it is dying?

Andrea Oleniczak's Orange Tree shows the artist on a ladder, filling the arms of a tree with clear glass oranges that contain fresh orange juice. Her act leaves behind an image of the city with a fruitful tree, in contrast to the original cold, barren and colorless scenery. What is invisible to us in a traditional still life or landscape painting - breeze whistling through trees, leaves fluttering on the ground, human intervention in landscape - are made visible through her physical presence as we are witness to her process and hopeful gesture.

Alexandra Ben Abba uses fire from molten glass as her scissor, burning her hair to achieve the desired length and style in Glass Haircut. An awkward yet tantalizing choreography of what would otherwise be mundane and normal, Ben Abba ia an example of an interesting undercurrent to this theme : a significant number of artists, many featured on this blog since 2009, subject their bodies to "strange interactions" with glass... Other examples of this trend include: Solange Ledwith wraps her body, cloaked in wet newspaper, with hot glass strands. Maria del Carmen Montoya and Naomi Kaly experience glass powder as make-up on the face. Suzanne Peck attempts to swim with glass floats around her arms. Carrie McIlwain submerges herself in a bathtub filled with glass shards. Charlotte Potter tries to heal her glassblowing scars by licking them like an animal..... In all cases, the works that investigate the body in this realm of endurance or discomfort are made by women.

The question follows: why do women have the tendency to do weird things with hot glass and their body ? is it mere coincidence? Or is it because they are more aware and engaged in the politics of the body in contemporary society? Such work may also stem from counteraction to the mostly male-dominated glassblowing world. Traditionally, the demonstration of virtuoso and machismo (i.e making heavy and big objects or showing off technical expertise) marks hot glass-working. Is the work we are witnessing by women post-glass artists a divergent and reasonable way to explore the material while addressing the issues of body using hot glass through feminine acts?

[Theme] Of Perceptual Experience :

2010-09-10T12:57:00.002-04:00

A significant number of works in The Post-Glass Video Festival use glass as a medium or tool - a lens, screen or mirror - to contemplate upon spaces and to alter our perception of them.

Like most non-glass makers, Ted Sonnenschein's relationship to glass as a material is defined by its presence in everyday objects, frequently mirrors and windows. A moving train, as Sonnenschein has discovered, indulges various optical activities simultaneously. It is a vantage point, a lens or conduit for light to pass through, a projection or reception screen. Keenly experiencing these aspects during his daily commutes, the commonplace yet unique perspective Sonnenschein adopts in this work presents the train as an object he is contained in as well as a device that captures moving image. In 6 Views of Berlin, he describes a "screen" as a hybrid between mirror and window.

Rui Sasaki's I eye I, in turn, focuses on the human eye, whose surface reflects the object it sees, but also absorbs the image. The mind in turn, becomes a sort of projection screen and its space, a camera obscura that receives an vision from outside its chamber. In this sense, our body's native video camera, the eye, brings the world that is external to our bodies, within it.

Heightened by Emer Lynch is a quiet and playful exploration of the similitude between water and glass, both clear and colorless. Floating glass objects on the surface of a water body act as lenses to pebbles that lie underneath while the water itself acts as a mirror, brining to earth the sky. Sometimes, this behavior is flipped around. At other times, interference patterns are generated between both materials. In such ways, the work explores perceptual experience through flirtations between illusion and substance.

Preview and Guide uses the Festival of Britain (FB) as an example of flowing visuality to present exactly the opposite nature of history and its consequent present. Matthew MacKisack uses the transparency of glass to present the opacity of history. In the layering of images, we see the marks of time, instead of its flow. Glass, here, has the illusory capacity to look back through time while video helps the artist do so fluidly, without friction, only to realize that a history, or the ideas it proposed, are not fluid.

Sarah Rose Allen's cup animates bubbles in the simple gesture of pouring. It attends to the movement of air during the creation of bubbles in a transparent medium, a moment that is lost when the phenomena is frozen into the glass object, and visits an overlooked gesture in the most transparent way possible : a clear medium in a clear object with neither in physical form.

The projection of one's self-image onto a copy of that image only to be confronted with a non-ideal, problematic or different one is a notion several post-glass video artists seem attracted to. This blog has already discussed the Lacanian perspective of the mirror, as well as the mirror presenting the Other. Breet Swenson does something different: he presents our understanding of the mirror as a lens that filters info and projects it, transmits it into space. In Dreamcast, the reflection of self-image (its mirror copy) is actually a clear, sculpted glass face superimposed with a digital video portrait of the same face. It is thus, subject to distortions due to transmission of light, causing the evolving image of a human is trapped and mutating within his static, ideal portrait.

As post-glass artists find ways to subvert conventional perceptions of mirror, lens, screen, video, glass..... we imagine these terms will be redefined using more complex vocabularies.

[Theme] As Membrane :

2010-09-10T11:44:00.006-04:00

A membrane is essentially a selective barrier-cum-passage. Our skin is a membrane : it covers and demarks our physical entity like a protective case. At the same time, it allows us to absorb the outer world into our bodies. Its pores and cells provide us access to the atmosphere and one another in ways that make us feel connected to the environment around us. The Post-Glass Video Festival features some works that explore various surface techniques and layering processes to speak about the membranous qualities of glass.

Table by Betsy Dadd is stop frame animation that is generated from oil painting on glass. While thematically centered around acts at a table, the animation is just as much about the materiality of glass that allows mutating images on its surface. Glass, as a membrane that offers no texture of its own is the perfect substrate or canvas. The subjects in Dadd's paintings move and flow, meld and erase as the pigment slides on the smooth surface of glass. The work inspires unadulterated joy of an image being formed and dissolved at front of our eyes.

In Compound Focus, a series of video portraits shot through a slab of dapple-textured glass by Emma Hogarth, an interesting flip of technological sensibility occurs. She transfers the effect of a still camera to the context of a moving image. The result is a painterly effect in which the subjects move very slowly and the slight shifts in light are transmitted through the glass membrane cum lens cum filter.

Netta Bacon's Pack imparts the human hand a quality of glass by printing on transparent paper. This is merged with the appearance of the glass glove that is transparent in its materiality. By thinking of glass as a membrane, the artist captures the body within an object (glove) only to exceed its boundaries like a ghost. A single image, yet layered. In both, material and metaphorical play of transparency.

Kevin Kay uses the transparency of glass in a different manner: he plays with antiquated technologies. In Untitled, membranes of tracing paper, the glass of the TV monitor, the image being played and VCR feedback vary the level of opacity from the re-shot projection. By treating this range of glass-based or glass-like "materials" as membranes that allow other images to seep through their surfaces, he constructs a complex, layered, abstract image, a collage in flux.

BMB (can't say goodbye) by Armel Hostiou is unique in this festival for the way in which it shift the perception of glass' invisible hardness : as a one-way membrane, a secret limit that can be passed in one direction but not in the other. Hostiou uses glass, breath and water to speak of invisible barriers such as the emotion of feeling trapped, or more simply, time, as a filter for matters or actions one way but not backwards. This one-way membrane of glass weaves doubt between absence and presence to represent two states of mind, time or situation.

In contrast is The Opposite of Mitosis by Charlotte Potter, which explores the dynamic space of fusion where two fluid entities meet and meld together. Enacted through the coming together of the shadows of two molten glass bubbles, the work specifically deals with push-and-pull interactions at the common membrane. Viewed in a petridish on a steel table, the installation uses a choreographed membrane of glass to engage the psychological space of fusion, one that neither always identical nor regulated.

As seen above, post-glass artists are sensitive to the material and optical properties of glass that lend themselves to being treated as a membrane in many ways.

Exhibiting Artist : Andrea Oleniczak

2010-08-29T09:53:00.004-04:00

In the age where digital photo frames are commonplace, the notion of a "video still life" only makes sense. The intent is poetic : the portrayal of a seemingly still landscape, knowing that no moment is still as the one preceding or succeeding it. The video begins with a still of a budding tree on Belle Isle and the skyline of Detroit behind it. Using a ladder, the artist fills the arms of this tree with clear glass oranges that contain fresh orange juice, leaving behind an image of the city with a fruitful tree.

Orange Tree is a nostalgic rendition of the notion of a still image in which, conventionally, time seemed to freeze up. In the video, what is invisible to us in a traditional still life or landscape painting - breeze whistling through trees, leaves fluttering on the ground, etc - are made visible to us in the frame of video. Here, the clouds pass. We see the painstaking and time-consuming process of placing objects in the landscape. The beautiful oxymoron lies in the impression of a still image despite all of this.

The addition of oranges - bright colored, tangy, juicy fruit - to the otherwise bland, bare and cold scenery speak s to a different kind of association in the artist's mind : " Detroit is a city of abandonment; abandoned production, homes, schools and industry....(I) create a more fruitful image of Detroit." Of course, the oranges are not real oranges that will perish. They are glass objects and will remain. They hung on the tree like Christmas balls, which they are not. They resemble fruit, signs of eternal hope and optimism in a colorless landscape. They, along with their smell, give the passerby (of the landscape) the opportunity to ponder their presence, in a way different from holiday decoration or plant growth.

As is common to post-glass artists, all this trouble is undertaken to create a few moments of experience. The glass oranges are recycled to become something else. The passerby is gone with a refreshed mind. And the viewer of the episode is left with the image of a fruitful tree in her mind. The investment here, like many post-glass artists, is in time, not in object.

Exhibiting Artist : Sarah Rose Allen

2010-08-29T09:47:00.005-04:00

Sarah Rose Allen's interest in poetic and visceral moments held within mundane acts is evident in her video installation, cup. The work animates bubbles in the simple gesture of pouring.

Studio glass is not unfamiliar with the inclusion of bubbles in glass. In fact, it is an integral part / concern to the medium's vocabulary. While many artists take extraordinary pains to avoid and remove bubbles that may be seen as aesthetically problematic, others make works out of placing bubbles intentionally within glass to create specific optical and formal effects. Either way, the dynamism of introducing bubbles and the movement of air during their creation is lost when the phenomena is frozen into the glass object.

Allen's video focusses on precisely those moments by keeping the constant creation and disappearance of bubbles alive. By a clever strategy, the cup is always only half-full, never overflowing, causing the act to never have to end. The video projection is installed in the darkened space of a closet, sometimes an alcove or corridor end, always an incidental space where the encounter of the virtual object and its phenomenon is a discovery.

The relationship between glass and video is of an interesting nature: Glass is a good memory-keeper of marks that were left behind, of ephemeral moments. But since it records time in invisible ways, it shows no memory of the act itself. Digital video on the other hand, is an excellent and accessible medium for capturing those moments, the details that are lost to a static entity of sculpture.

From the works of post-glass artists, it seems that the study of fundamental processes and appreciation for vision is leading to the use of video because it picks up where the self-contained object fails. Keeping its integrity of attending to a mundane, ephemeral moment that we encounter frequently, cup uses the ability of video to capture an overlooked gesture in the most transparent way possible : a clear medium in a clear object with neither in physical form.

Exhibiting Artist : Arun Sharma

2010-08-29T07:29:00.006-04:00

(de)composition : self-portrait is an hour long video in which an unfired ceramic bust of the artist deteriorates in a contained pool of water. Shot through a clear glass box, the video gradually becomes foggy because of the dispersion of fine clay particles in the glass cube filled with water. A visual representation of the breakdown of the human form, (de)composition : self-portrait achieves a quiet and meditative transformation through the laws of entropy.

Entropy is essentially microscopic disorder. It describes the tendency for a contained system to go from a state of higher to lowest organization on a molecular level. We comprehend this intuitively when we melt an ice cube in a glass of water, or drop a cube of sugar into a cup of coffee. The changes always involve moving from disequilibrium or localized presence (eg. a substance) to equilibrium or dispersion (i.e. its surroundings). Thus, entropy affects the space into which a substance spreads. The entropic goal is to erase the distinction between substance and surrounding.

This is seen clearly in Sharma's video : As the box shifts from transparency to opacity, the object within it becomes formless. As the surroundings go from invisibility to solidity, the entity goes from solidity to invisibility. The firmness rendered by the opacity of the medium means the absence of an object within it. Destruction of the substance of an earthen human form causes its surroundings, water in the box, to be full of the substance.

If the point of a closed system, like the one set up in this work, is to move from kinetic to potential energy, to the calmest state possible, then Sharma's questions run deep : How does entropy occur in a human body? Does the invisibility mean that it is dying?

Perhaps in response, are the artist's words : "The slow-falling flakes of clay and the floating tendrils of clay fog create a spiritual, calming element that I have not often associated with the idea of death. At the end of the hour long video, the falling debris creates a fog that eventually envelopes the head, signifying the way we are slowly forgotten in the memory of the living and are lost in history."

Exhibiting Artist : Brett Swenson

2010-08-28T16:01:00.003-04:00

The moving image of a face is projected onto a glass cast of the same face that is seated on a rotating pedestal. The viewer is able to turn this pedestal, thereby creating optical distortions of the digital projection. As the cast is turned, ghostly reflections of the mutated face travel along the walls, its eyes constantly moving, looking around at its environment, and often times making eye contact with the viewer.

The projection of one's self-image onto a copy of that image only to be confronted with a non-ideal, problematic or different one is a notion several post-glass video artists seem attracted to. In Dreamcast, the mirror, i.e the static object that receives one's self-image, is a three-dimensional casting, fixed in both contour and time. But the image that falls upon it, i.e. digital video from the projector, changes. Since the designated "mirror" is not reflective, no image bounces back. Instead, it is subject to distortions due to transmission of light through the clear glass cast. The evolving image of a human is trapped and mutating within his static, ideal portrait. In a disturbing encounter with a floating face, as it meets ones's eye occasionally, the mirror acts as a lens.

In this way, Swenson's work demonstrates a recurring area of interest, to be discussed later in this blog, as it emerges from several post-glass works : perceptual shifts using the materiality and metaphor of the mirror.

Exhibiting Artist : Emma Hogarth

2010-08-28T15:28:00.004-04:00

In homage to analog methods of achieving special effects, Hogarth seeks the role of the viewing lens as both window and optical device. Compound Focus is a series of video portraits shot through a slab of glass. The glass bears a dappled texture that comes from chill marks when molten, slightly bubbled glass is poured onto cool graphite. This texture distorts the image of the subjects who picture is being shot, and like a special effects filter, gives them a painterly effect that is reminiscent of Impressionist painting styles that were highly influential on the Pictorialist movement.

The artist says, "Pictorialist photographers, active around the turn of the twentieth century, subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Their photographs were characterized by atmospheric effects achieved by using soft focus, special filters, lens coatings and experimental printing processes. By using the material qualities of glass to achieve a painterly effect in a digital video work," Hogarth draws our attention to the role of glass in development of optical and imaging technologies.

In an interesting flip of technological sensibility, she transfers the effect of a still camera to the context of a moving image. The subjects move very slowly and the slight shifts in light are transmitted through the glass membrane cum lens cum filter. Yet the image formed in one's mind is of still nature. In contrast to artist Betsy Dadd's video, which unpacks the moment of a the work provides an interesting connection between old, (rendered) obsolete media, materiality and new media.

Exhibiting Artist : Betsy Dadd

2010-08-28T13:24:00.003-04:00

Table is a collation of several scenes, each depicting a person engaged in an activity set at a table. This stop frame animation is generated from oil painting on glass.

Painting on glass is an old and integral part of the material's history. This includes reverse painting techniques, oil, enamel and gold painting across European, Islamic and Asian cultures, in themes ranging from scenery to patterns to portraiture to story-telling. The vocabulary finds place in contemporary glass as well, with artists painstakingly airbrushing or hand-painting images of (often) personal narrative on vessel surfaces, sometime in several layers. Especially because of the invisible materiality of glass that holds no memory of its own. No matter what the outlet or form, it seems as though joy in the process lies in a basic movement - that of pushing pigment around. Playing with tactile color to form and erase lines, contours and densities. Yet the tenuous struggle between excitement and frustration, acumen and experiment, during this process is lost to the final outcome. A painted canvas reveals the artist's strokes and inclinations with a certain finality. It is static.

Dadd's video is beautiful in that it simply "un-freezes" the painted moment by bringing into view decisions of time, not just stroke. Glass, as a membrane that offers no texture of its own is the perfect substrate. The subjects in these paintings are formed, come in and out of focus, are pushed around as desired. They move and flow, meld and erase as the pigment slides on the smooth surface of glass. In a William Kentridge-esque manner of creating a figure in a story, without explosive narratives and complex agendas, Table inspires unadulterated joy of an image being formed and dissolved at front of our eyes.

While thematically centered around acts at a table, the animation is just as much about the materiality of glass as a membrane and process of mutating images on its surface.

Exhibiting Artist : Matthew MacKisack

2010-08-28T11:25:00.016-04:00

The 1951 'Festival of Britain' was intended to encourage post-war regeneration and optimism. It was a statement of social, scientific and cultural achievement. 18 million visitors saw pioneering work in many fields including the first radio telescope and post-war housing solutions. However, the utopianism of the Festival was short-lived: a month after its closure, the Conservative party gained power and the future was re-interpreted through individualism and material aspirations.

Preview and Guide presents the Festival of Britain (FB) through quotations and pronouncements, both predictive and diagnostic. The lack of its concrete-ness is indicated by no direct representation of the festival, and the future it proposed is realized obliquely, perhaps disappointedly, in the final image of social housing in the present day.

MacKisack uses the transparency of glass to present the opacity of history. In the layering of images, we see the marks of time, instead of its flow. Glass, here, has the illusory capacity to look back through time while video helps the artist do so fluidly, without friction, only to realize that a history, or the ideas it proposed, are not fluid. Without critical awareness, one's understanding of the present is sometimes abrupt. The treatment of video in the work highlights this disjunct. Preview and Guide uses a flowing visuality to present exactly the opposite nature of history and its consequent present.

Exhibiting Artist : Charlotte Potter

2010-08-28T11:25:00.013-04:00

The biological process of cell division in which a parent cell splits into two identical daughter cells is called Mitosis. Highly regulated and complex, errors in mitosis kill or mutate cells causing disease such as cancer. However, if seen at a more fundamental level, mitosis is part of the study of fusion, of how an entity is created and how it propagates. It is the starting point for the paradigm of "relationships" at a cellular level.

Potter uses, in a reverse sort of way, the analogy of mitosis to explore the space of fusion, for that is where she believes relationships lie, be they human or with materials like glass. In The Opposite of Mitosis, she enacts the coming together of two molten glass bubbles through a play of their shadows.

Devoid of extraneous contextual information, and relying only on their densities of black and white as filtered by light through a screen, two dark "pods" at the end of black sticks enter the frame. Slowly, they are filled with breath. They expand, touch each other and share a common membrane. In one instance, the contact point is minimal and the weight of the individual personalities preclude a wider contact area. In another, one bubble slips away, forming a cord-like connection, only to break off (as the glass behind the screen gets cold). A bubble pushes too much air into itself or grabs the second to overwhelm the other in size. At other times, the two bubbles meld in a balanced, reciprocal manner...

The very specific process of alternately blowing air into and then sucking air out from a hot glass bubble until it cools and will expand no more, has been used to determine the lifespan of each encounter. The ultra-thin membrane between the two bubbles is then blown back and forth until the bubbles break, sometimes like a steady dying heartbeat, and at other times, like a fish gasping and struggling for breath when placed out of water. The artist's attention to dynamics from several such interactions form the exact moments of interest in The Opposite of Mitosis.

This visceral video of the shadow of two bubbles meeting and melding into one is installed in a petridish and set on a steel table. In an attempt to engage the psychological space of fusion, one that is neither always identical nor regulated as defined by mitosis - the installation references a clinical study of relationships, the emotions surrounding them - those seductive, volatile, unequal, entanglements - and the possibility of therapy.

The Opposite of Mitosis is one of several works that use glass as a membrane, a theme of perceptual shift that will be discussed later in the blog.

Exhibiting Artist : Emer Lynch

2010-08-26T13:31:00.003-04:00

Heightened is a quiet and playful exploration of the similitude between water and glass, both clear and colorless.

Open hemispheres of glass, like rimmed half bubbles, float around in a pebbled water body, sometimes alone, other times, in groups. In doing so, they assume several forms; they are activated by various phenomena; they engage with their environment in different ways - They act as lenses and magnify the pebbles underneath. It seems as though a strange suction has occurred on spots on the water's surface. A negative space that has displaced the water that would have filled otherwise. They mingle with real bubbles marking the water. They may be white rocks or floating loops of thread. Or reflections from the sky just like the trees around them. They interact with ripples formed in the water body's calm. At night, they appear like cells, with their edges glowing as though injected with a dye under a microscope.

Filmed in a location devoid of man-made intrusions, the vessels floating on the water subvert the standard orientation of the horizon, thereby exaggerating the floati-ness of both materials being explored. Against the backdrop of shifting horizon and focus, Lynch explores the flirtation between illusion and substance. This work is the artist's response to living within an urban landscape in Ireland, "seeking the natural amongst my manmade habitat".

Exhibiting Artist : Armel Hostiou

2010-08-26T13:09:00.002-04:00

In a short narrative that transitions from representation of a figure to an abstraction, BMB (can't say goodbye) reveals a secret limit that can be passed in one direction but not in the other.

The emotion of feeling trapped is wistful and sometimes, oppressive. Hostiou uses glass, and water, a glass-like substance, to speak of invisible barriers such as time. Desiring for a view of the city, a woman is able to enter her balcony through a large, open window. But she is unable to return into the room because the open space now bears an impenetrable transparency. The only - and momentary - indication of this surface is the vapor of the actor's breath, soon replaced by streams of water running down the glass plane as though they were tears on a face. Trapped, the world behind the woman becomes dark. The subject disappears behind the torrential wall of water, only to leave behind a few streaks of water on the invisible glass pane and a few dots of light in the background.

Through this mutation and disappearance of space, location and person, Hostiou presents the notion of time as a filter for matters or actions one way but not backwards. Her work is unique in this festival for the way in which it shift the perception of glass' invisible hardness : as a one-way membrane. In doing so using video, she weaves doubt between absence and presence to represent two states of mind, time or situation.

Exhibiting Artist : Netta Bacon

2010-08-26T12:39:00.003-04:00

Pack features a straightforward yet enigmatic gesture : A hand is held out. It closes into a fist. A glass glove appears to encase the fisted hand like a clear casket that fixes the body in space and time.The hand opens up and reaches out of the glove, as though it were just a memory.

In her attempt to trace lines of meaning between a concrete gesture, the association and its fleeting memory, Bacon maintains a constant rhythm of adding and dropping frames. Speaking about her process, Bacon says,"Frames were printed on transparent paper. The body becomes transparent like the glass boxing glove. Frames were then piled one on top of the other, creating an accumulating image, a pack. As a few frames are added on top, one is taken from the bottom of the pile in a constant rhythm."

The hand is imparted the quality of glass by printing on transparent paper. This is merged with the appearance of the glass glove that is transparent in its materiality. A single image, yet layered. In both a material and metaphorical play of transparency.

The gesture is frozen in the physicality of the boxing glove. Only here, the shifting transparency serves as a ghost to speak of something imaginary. Is the glove, by virtue of being of a real, physical substance protecting the hand or locking it? Yet the hand escapes the glove and we are once again in the realm of an echo. Pack is an incredibly short animation developed from this incredibly intense process.

Exhibiting Artist : Kevin Kay

2010-08-26T10:36:00.004-04:00

In this digital version of the Super 8 Black and White film Untitled, Kay pays homage to what we often describe as antiquated tools in the style of early video art, where the crossover between film and video were explored.

By nature film is a transparent membrane. Images are formed when light passes through each frame. With the aid of a film projector, television, analog video camera and VCR, this work is created by continually layering imagery. The membranes of tracing paper, the glass of the TV monitor, the image being played and VCR feedback vary the level of opacity from the re-shot projection.

The result is a collage in flux, one that may never need to have a definitive end to its process, using the television glass screen as a canvas.

Exhibiting Artist : Ted Sonnenschein

2010-08-26T10:17:00.004-04:00

6 Berlin Views are short segments shot aboard Berlin's commuter trains. As a train departs from, transits through and arrives at various stations, the artist focuses his camera on the visual landscape formed on the glass windows of the fast-moving container inside which he stands.

Like most non-glass makers, Sonnenschein's relationship to glass as a material is defined by its presence in everyday objects, frequently mirrors and windows. Consequently, his understanding of the material is shaped by observed phenomena : reflection and transparency. In 6 Berlin Views, he brings together the two seemingly opposite surfaces - a mirror, which is typically opaque and reflects the subject standing across from it, and a clear window, which allows the subject to see through it - onto one projection surface. This is the window of the train.

Using simple documentation of events they unfold, he removes all pretense and deliberation on his part to guide the viewer towards a specific narrative. Instead, like light diffraction patterns, he allows the viewer to go back and forth between the "mirror" and "window" aspects of the projected image. At times, the images are discerned At other times, the images merge in ghostly ways. In a sense, he describes a screen as a combination of moving image and glass, and within that, a repository to hold what lies beyond the materiality of its substance, be it shadow, reflection or scenery.

Typically, studio artists apply images of landscape on vessels through engraving, enameling, layering, sandblasting, cutting, etc. As artists, we are constantly trying to encapsulate or represent what lies beyond the confines of the vessel on its surface. What Sonnenschein does flips that relationship around and changes the scale : He sees himself as being contained within the vessel (the train) as opposed to looking at it. He creates the image onto the object's surface in real-time using the optical qualities of the object itself (the train) as opposed to manipulating the vessel's form by say, cutting into it.

We are, of course, familiar with several devices in the long history of objects - the camera obscura, magic lantern, telescope, microscope, etc - that bring the outside world into a confined space. Usually though, a device accomplishes one thing at a time. A moving train, as Sonnenschein has discovered, indulges various optical activities simultaneously. It is a vantage point, a lens or conduit for light to pass through, a projection or reception screen. Keenly experiencing these aspects during his daily commutes, the commonplace yet unique perspective Sonnenschein adopts in this work presents the train as an object he is contained in as well as a device that captures moving image . In turn, the video exposes a cinematic space that is created by a vessel onto its own walls in an ephemeral marking of passage of time.

Exhibiting Artist : Rui Sasaki

2010-08-22T14:04:00.003-04:00

The human body discerns moving image through the eye, our biological video camera. In a short study, I Eye I captures on digital video the image that is held by the artist's eye.

The human eye lens is fascinating in nature : Its surface reflects the object it sees while its cones and rods capture details of the object at an astounding frame rate and transmits the same to the mind. It is a mirror and transparent membrane at the same time. A surface from which an image bounces back at us, also absorbs the image, allows it to pass through and projects it into the human mind. The mind in turn, becomes a sort of projection screen and its space, a camera obscura that receives an vision from outside its chamber. In this sense, our body's native video tool, the eye, brings the world that is external to our bodies, within it.

The question is, what does Sasaki's eye see that she seeks to internalize? To the artist, her studio is the space where she spends most of her time, where her ideas transfer to physical objects. They get visualized into comprehensible entities in the studio just as what our eyes see are concretized in the camera obscura-like space of the human mind. In an unspecified critique and without narrative outcome, in an act of ocular endurance, this work is Sasaki's attempt to understand what the space of her studio means by holding its image in her eyes across day and night.

Exhibiting Artist : Andrew Salgado

2010-08-22T08:26:00.009-04:00

The Only Thing You Can Count On Is Your Family uses the metaphor of glass in a manner of confrontation. Here is a dialogue with (homo)sexuality, homophobia and identity, especially through confrontation with the conceptual understanding of their shifting boundaries.

Salgado places his figure in the metaphorical space of the mirror to reflect an image of the Other or monstrous. By transforming from a white to black man, he evokes long-drawn discussion of racial divide. He chooses to become the religious Other when he removes the cross of Christianity from his body. As he unclothes to reveal a slender frame, shaves his head and all facial hair including his eyebrows, he moves more delicately into territory that is past heterosexuality. As he reads the contents of personal communication with his family, the artist removes every evidence that is identifiable and presumed about him in the Euro-centric world: white, christian and heterosexual. The narrative is very personal, and before our eyes, he transforms from what is socially and familially acceptable to what is not, what is questionable, alienated, disapproved and perhaps despised by some.

It is said that without reflection, gaze and shadow, we would have little understanding of ourselves as a whole entity. A child at six months lacks coordination and is unable to fully comprehend what goes where and how one part of its body fits into the other. Yet it is able to recognize itself in the mirror. This synthesis of a whole image delights the child, at the same time producing a sense of contrast with its seemingly fragmented body. From the ensuing tension begins the construction of the Ego and consequently, projections (and subjugations) of identity-related biases. The mirror phase was defined by the psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan in 1936. He proposed that Ego is the product of a fundamental misunderstanding, a false recognition, which situates the agency of the ego in a fictional direction. The child becomes alienated from itself before any sort of social determination can take place. In other words, the mirror stage introduces the baby into an imaginary order. While this idea has been criticized widely because for the infant to recognize itself in the mirror, it must already have a sense of self underway, Lacan's concept finds place in literary critique : the mirror separates us from our selves; In order to recognize myself, I have to be separate from my self. Modern media too, utilizes this infantile fascination with the reflected image, by showing us pictures into which we are invited to project ourselves.

Salgado uses our familiarity of being implicated in such projections well. He sets up an intimate cinematic space - not voyeuristic but point-blank - as if a mini-stage has been emptied of everything but his private moment. We are privy to his actions. He sets up the simple unquestioned device of a mirror for us we watch him undergo changes in physical appearance. As we listen to his words and watch, we comprehend everything he is doing step by step, as it is reflected accurately in the mirror. Yet, by the end, in the style of the impending growth of a horror film (where a bathroom mirror sucks the person into a distant land), we are returned with an image that is so far removed from the subject. We are now confronted with "the person who is not".
Along with a stark visual comes the revelation that these differences are in (social) perception. And that the unfamiliar alien, the misunderstood and distasteful Other is but one of two sides of the same coin, the coin being the self. Through "intimate and provocative portrayals,... clandestine moments for public reception", Salgado hopes that "the viewer considers the private but wholly real social politics of prejudice, sexuality, and violence."

Exhibiting Artist: Alexandra Ben Abba

2010-08-19T14:07:00.006-04:00

Glass Haircut is a post-glass artist's rendition of giving herself a haircut. Using fire from molten glass as her scissor, the artist burns her hair to achieve the desired length and style.

In a strange displacement from everyday life, every expression on her face is evidence to the smell of burning hair; the careful gestures of her fingers imply the hot and dangerous substance touching her body....almost. The glowing goo at the end of a metal rod looks mysterious, especially to those who are not familiar with glassblowing. It is only the smoke coming from the hair that implies what this material is.

With all external references to the immediate, physical environment removed (perhaps a glassmaking studio), the video's composition uses its reference to the "Black" or Claude Mirror well. An oddity today, the Claude Lorrain Mirror is made of black glass, slightly convex, and produces a reduced, upright reflection. It was used by landscape painters in the 18-19th centuries to concentrate on form, line and perspective by suppressing color saturation and muting tonal values. The black mirror was a pre-photographic optical instrument, a virtual reality device of sorts. It edited a natural scene in very specific ways to make it easier for the artist to focus on drawing what was important to the scene.
By removing all evidence of her immediate physical background, Ben Abba does something similar. She creates a black mirror that directs the attention of the viewer to a very specific scene. She transforms what would otherwise be read as a reflective surface to one that absorbs her image. Her reflection is now, an actor in spotlight on a stage, the subject of a "moving painting" and not someone standing plainly at front of a mirror.

In this way, she uses digital video to reclaim and manipulate the optical space of the mirror. In a sense, the mirror becomes the protagonist who captures the performer's transformation, her sense of calm and conviction in the end when she is happy with the results. As she tosses her hair about and walks off with a smile, one wonders about a curious pattern this work falls into : the tendencies of post-glass artists to subject their bodies to wierd ways of doing something normal (in this case, getting a pretty haircut).

A significant number of artists, many featured on this blog since 2009, seem to subject their bodies to strange interactions with glass. These individuals are women. Is this mere coincidence? Is there an increased engagement of feminine body politics in a field that has historically been characterized by machismo? Glass Haircut is representative of these questions while presents an awkward yet tantalizing choreography of what would otherwise be mundane and normal.

And of course, the observation made above about women post-glass artists will be discussed further in the days to come.

Exhibiting Artist :Kimberly McKinnis

2010-08-16T12:24:00.004-04:00

Set, shot and edited in the Do-It-Yourself style of home videos, Untitled: The Shape of an Emotion II documents the process of grinding, by hand, a whole glass beer bottle into the very small pieces.

The most "visible" component of this work is, curiously, its audio track. The incessant grinding of glass against harsh concrete speaks of endurance in the same way that someone grinds their teeth in pain. Just as the sound of grinding teeth fills the head of a person, causing it to throb, the prolonged determination of the artist's action fills the screen with its non-human scream. The pitch of the grinding sound shifts higher and higher as the bottle disintegrates into smaller and smaller piece, and begs the question: when will she be done?

Even though the viewer is aware of the outcome, and the video shows no surprise otherwise, watching the video requires a certain amount of endurance on the part of the viewer, knowing that the act itself is of the same quality, and no effort is made to cloak or edit it in a prettier, more appealing fashion. In Untitled :..., the aggression assumes form of slow, non-vocal and painstaking destruction. If the bottle were to symbolize one's pain, would grinding it away relentlessly with the goal to convert it into dust - to erase completely all form - heal?

This video is also an example of a recurrent theme amongst several artists : the penchant to work with broken glass. What meaning is there, to be found or made, from the act of destroying glass? The theme will be discussed in a later post.

Exhibiting Artist : Giuseppe Di Bella

2010-08-16T08:13:00.003-04:00

A glass bottle, once broken is not recuperable. It has lost its function and must be discarded. Its contents have spilled, are spoiled and cannot be consumed anymore. The little pieces it has broken into are dangerous: they will poke and cut, and must be collected carefully and thrown away. In the contrary spirit of optimism and hope, Healing depicts the puzzle-like reconstruction of a broken milk bottle, shard by shard, into its former whole self.

Unlike other works featured on this blog that treat breaking as an aggressive act, Di Bella's gesture in the video is one of tender care. It is a patient, calm and painstaking endeavor of a hand to put back in place every broken piece of an object that was shattered previously because of being dropped. This is particularly poignant because the object is a bottle that contained milk, a symbol of nourishment and an unconditional relationship of love. Di Bella reminds us, by example, that the hands that spill are the hands that collect. The hands that destroy are also the hands that create. And the process of healing is often slow, with much effort and attention going into which parts fit where and which do not.

Healing clearly uses a metaphor for dealing with loss and closure of a wound. The metaphor of a heart of glass is an old one. As the saying goes, " Be it a piece of glass or a heart, its finality lies in shattering to innumerable bits". By reversing the above fate, Di Bella allows the viewer to re-appropriate the metaphor in their own way; to perhaps assimilate a space within which they can reflect.

This video is also an example of a recurrent theme amongst several artists : the desire to engage broken glass. What meaning is there, to be found or made, from the act of breaking glass? Or connotations therefrom? The theme will be discussed in a later post.

Exhibiting Artist: Brett Swenson

2010-08-16T08:01:00.005-04:00

A hooded male emerges from an elevator into a dark space. He holds a spot-heating gas torch, turns it on and directs the flame frontally, towards the viewer. The flame is small and pointed, and as the focus of the camera fades in and out, the scene appears to be from a dark, slow dream.

In a split second, however, there appears a gaping, smoking hole, suspended mid-air between the viewer and the man as he turns his torch off and disappears. Only to re-appear and repeat the action at a different spot in mid-air. Over several episodic appearances in this dream-like state that fades in and out of vision, the cinematic "space" between the artist and the viewer reveals itself to contain a large clear pane of glass.

From this point onwards, Execution begins a game of expectancy with the viewer: what will happen next? at what point will the glass break? what happens to the man when it breaks?... Impacted by bullets of heat repeatedly, the invisible glass surface is replaced by a completely opaque broken surface of tempered glass. The cinematic space that was previously transparent is now blocked by a screen. The executioner is now inaccessible and but a silhouette standing behind a hole-ridden portrait that is beautiful in its ghostly form.

This video demonstrates a recurrent theme amongst several artists : the penchant to break glass. What meaning is there, to be found or made, from the act of breaking glass? The theme will be discussed in a later post.

Exhibiting Artist : Alana Kakoyiannis

2010-08-16T07:54:00.002-04:00

Untitled captures the straightforward moment that a Pyrex dish shatters in a sink. It is the pace at which this act unfolds, over the course of 3 minutes, that captures the viewer's attention and imagination.

We are altogether familiar with the notion of slow-motion replays during sporting moments and surveillance acts - to determine if a tennis ball touched fault line in a game at Wimbledon, if foul play ensued in a moment of soccer injury at the World cup, exactly how a person was accosted and abducted as they exited public office, or how a bank user struggled with a malfunctioning ATM machine.....Video is often used as a tool to magnify the moment that happens too fast in real time to comprehend action. Untitled does precisely this. Only that in its simplicity lies a deception of one's perception.

While using video's effectiveness as a medium to record an ephemeral act, Kakoyiannis has removed all visual cues that would cause the viewer to study the context of the violent act. Rather than lead the viewer into specific narratives, her focus seems the phenomenon of breakage itself, in a style reminiscing the early era of black and white video work. She also removes all evidence of force in the gesture through her manipulation of video frame rate. To the viewer, it seems like a glass tray is being placed in a metal sink; commonplace. Yet, suddenly, the result of this benign act is startling. The vessel breaks from touching the sink, with an all-too-familiar crashing sound. And the viewer is forced, rudely, to comprehend and reconstruct in her mind, the undisputed presence of that force.

Kakoyiannis considers force as though it were a transparent material, one that is very much part of the equation but invisible to our eye....eg. a pristine window made of clear glass that birds sometimes, accidentally, fly into. Or if one were to use an analogy of hotworking glass: Just as a hot, semi-molten glass object shows little evidence of the human force that go into the process of making it, the marks being visible only when it transforms into its cold, hard self, Untitled cloaks the aggression, the presence of force, till we hear the sound (like tool-marks on the object). Her work, thus, allows our minds to (mis)comprehend a transparent entity : of glass; of force.

This video is also an example of a recurrent theme amongst several artists : the penchant to break glass. What meaning is there, to be found or made, from the act of breaking glass? The theme will be discussed in a later post.

The Post-Glass Video Festival 2010 opens Sep 10 @ Heller Gallery NY

2010-08-16T07:12:00.004-04:00

The Post-Glass Video Festival presents 20 works that expose specific relationships with glass - phenomenological, material, social and personal - through digital video. The festival indulges concepts that either trace back to the direct and mediated experience of glass, or actively investigate common perceptions and complex connotations of the material.

Working with the lens of a video camera, artists featured in the exhibition engage a wide gamut. They investigate an intimate relationship with glass, capture the poetic beauty of vulnerable moments using the metaphors of glass and implement performative acts that problematize a situation or provide insight. They explore social implications of transparency and reflectivity and create moments by unmaking the objects ... ... ... The Festival, thus, showcases a variety of short videos ranging from abstract and perceptual to narrative and process-based. In all cases, the works are manifested best through the vocabulary of video, and in some case, with an active physical/installation component.

The exhibition debuts at Heller Gallery in New York from Sep 10- 25, 2010 and travels to other locations in Seattle and Sydney Australia thereafter.

Participating artists :
Alana Kakoyiannis . Alexandra Ben Abba . Andrea Oleniczak . Andrew Salgado . Armel Hostiou . Arun Sharma . Betsy Dadd . Brett Swenson . Charlotte Potter . Emer Lynch . Emma Hogarth . Giuseppe di Bella . Kevin Kay . Kimberly McKinnes . Matthew MacKisack . Netta Bacon . Rui Sasaki . Sarah Rose Allen . Ted Sonnenschein

Over the next few weeks, this blog will present the work that will be exhibited by these artists.

Emotional Weight from the Weightlessness of Glass : 1000 halos by Hiromi Takizawa

2010-08-15T07:14:00.008-04:00

An artist who engages specific dialogues inherent to her Japanese heritage and the subtle nuances and observable oddities of living in the “West”, Takizawa integrates observed optical phenomena - transmission, reflection and refraction of light through glass - into personal narratives. She uses shifts in perception unique to the qualities of glass, to transform emotions and cultural paradigms into experiences of concrete materiality.

In recent work, Takizawa's attention is directed specifically towards the power of a halo : the ring of aura that surround the heads of spiritual figures across both European and Asian cultures. 1000 halos transforms the artist's experience at Japan's Sanjusangen-dou temple (where an intangible aura resonates from the halo ring or disks of 1,000 Buddha statues) into a wall-based installation composed of 1000 nearly-invisible, warm-tinted glass shards, each with a hole. Light is cast through these objects, shadows are formed on the wall. The holes, like magic, are transformed into glowing halos.

"It is an amazing and stunning experience when I walked into the temple. I felt the weight of the history, and the craftsmanship of wood sculptures is very intense," Takizawa says, and in turn, recreates a similar, overwhelming emotional weight for viewers to encounter in a trans-cultural setting. In the process of doing so, she engages two conversations that are of interest to post-glass "watchers" :

* She brings to studio glass a rigorous study of "membranously" thin glass, an example of intense development of potential (technique and vocabulary) in an area previously ignored, unseen or out-of-bounds (in this case, residue or mistake). Takizawa burns through the surface of an extremely thin-skinned unshaped glass bubble by spot-heating. The rings pop out by themselves due to thermal shock in open air after a little while. Simply put, Takizawa changes the rules of glassblowing to produce rings.

* She toys with hierarchy in relationship between object and shadow by bringing the intangible shadows into poetic prominence in the installation. She doubles the concrete materiality of glass in a weightless manner. The viewers' experience towards this field of halos is based on their ability to shift perception when they encounter the installation. Notions of a finite object and self-contained beauty inherent to studio glass are transcended.

Takizawa's thousand rings embody the weightlessness, transparency, and fragility of her personal questions: to communicate the intensity she witnessed in the form a specific instance of Japanese material culture, but in a form that exceeds the physical object, remains intangible yet powerful. 1000 halos are cut out of glass, but their expression is manifest in their projection of light.

1000 halos is on view at the Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, NY Sep 15 - Dec 23 2010 and during the exhibition "Objects of Devotion and Desire" at Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, NY in 2011.

So "glassy-looking" but not glass: Shari Mendelson's current work

2010-02-18T22:17:00.008-05:00

Shari Mendelson creates historically-inspired vases that are made of discarded plastic bottles. The visual aesthetics of the work speaks strongly about traditional hand craft. On the contrary, her material implies consumer culture and issues of mass production.

Image excerpted from artists webiste

A HOLE by Yoko Ono

2010-02-17T16:09:00.003-05:00

A pane of glass is penetrated by a bullet, leaving a trace of violent act.
Yoko Ono instructs to go to the other side of the bullet hole and look through it.
For Ono, transparency and fragility of glass becomes a simple but powerful tool to speak about contradictions that resides in a society, and a shift of mindset by exchanging our viewpoints.

Image excerpted from gallery 360 degrees
http://www.360.co.jp/e/exhibition.html

Virtually Glassy

2009-12-06T11:35:00.001-05:00

RealFlow test from TimmY on Vimeo.

The Post-Glass Video Festival 2010

2009-11-28T14:21:00.005-05:00

Working Title: The Post-Glass Video Festival
Exhibition date and location: July - August 2010, locations TBD
Deadline for submissions: Jan 31, 2010

The Post-Glass* Video Festival will present works that explore unique relationships between digital video/film and glass, in light of the studio practice of a significant number of emerging artists.

We seek works that toy with phenomenology, materiality or social/personal experience of glass through video. For example, you may be working on an animation with clear glass subjects. Perhaps you wish to speak about the nature of glass through non-glass materials. Maybe you see something that is captured only through the tools and format of video. It is possible that your experience of a certain phenomenon is remarkably un-glass-like and evident only as a choreographed act in video. Or that the outcome of your artistic process builds an insightful or entertaining drama, best voiced through digital “film”.

In short, the relationship that you explore between these two media may be rational, personal, virtual, abstract, animated, narrative or process-based, as long as you have an understanding and appreciation for video as much as you do for its counterpart in material / phenomenon.

We seek works whose concepts may trace back to either the direct/mediated experience of glass or an active investigation of certain phenomena - optical, acoustical, olfactory, haptic, and yet, manifest only through the vocabulary of video. We seek self-contained video pieces, rather than documentation of ephemeral work unless it plays a greater role in the feature. Convince us. To this end, we also welcome proposals of new projects that you would like to make and that The Post-Glass* Video Festival could be a good platform for.

* This blog has more information about a “post-glass artist”.

To submit
Please email yukanjali@gmail.com with a letter of interest that introduces your project.
You may submit up to 3 works/ideas for consideration. Indicate whether finished /in-progress work or proposal in the subject line. In the main body of the email, include a brief description (upto 250 words) outlining the work - concept, narrative, elements, duration, methodology.If you are submitting a proposal, tell us about the video you would like to make. Attach image/video/sound files as needed, less than 10MB.

Please label attachments as follows: yourlastname_entrynumber_imagenumber.fileformat (eg. genius_01_03.mov for a movie file sent by Jane Genius in support of submission 1 and image 3 within that submission). Do not forget to list contact information at the bottom of your email to us.

We will contact you by Feb 15, 2010 to discuss details of curatorial support and a suitable timeline for the production of selected submissions between Feb and Jun 2010. We hope to make the post-glass video festival a travelling exhibit at various public locations. The venues are to be decided based on submissions received.

For more information and questions about the post-glass-ism and yukanjali’s last exhibit (How is this glass?), please join this blog or email us.

Les Instantanes by Julien Marie at Wood Street Galleries PA

2009-11-23T02:13:00.003-05:00

The Berlin-based French artist who experiments with various forms of projection debuts in the U.S.A with "Matter and Memory" (through Dec 2009) at The Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh. I was fortunate to be able to witness two floors of his works. Completely taken by the artist's innovation with steel micro-balls acting as a material in slow motion (but in reality); indescribably moved by his ablility to empower the exhibit participant who moves blank paper pieces on a table to reconstruct a forgotten image through a projection.

Particularly relevant to this blog is the drama and ingenunity of "Les Instantanes". Kurt Shaw, art critic with the Tribune describes the work :"Filling the entire third-floor gallery, it seems at first glance to be a simple, three-part sequence of slide projections of images of droplets of water in reverse. But upon further inspection, the viewer likely will notice, when looking at the exposed mechanics of each projector, that each contains tiny glass sculptures on a constantly spinning wheel. Maire actually made these 1:1-scale glass reproductions, in which each drop of water seemingly falls and jumps back up out of a surface.
In effect, Maire has created a different kind of cinema -- creating sequenced images representing tiny, fleeting moments, out of something that is very tangible and real."

My own experience of the work was a simple sigh of admiration and sheer joy at witnessing the precious construction of a moment.

Image: Les Instantanes (1998) by artist Julien Maire. Credit: James Knox /Tribune Review.

Exhibition announcement

2009-06-07T15:26:00.003-04:00

This multi-venue exhibition sponsored by the ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes Region in Corning, NY at venues :
38 W Market St . 78 W Market St . 79 W Market St . 65 E Market St
Dates: June 10-13, 2009; 12 noon to 6 pm with a reception at 6-9pm on June 12, 2009

h o w i s t h i s g l a s s ? presents the unpredictable ways in which artists open our minds up to possibility of new relationships and forms that may underlie the realm of glass. Innovative, idiosyncratic, insightful and extraordinary, their methods and actions ensure our attention, curiosity and support. Here we profile an important part of the contemporary studio glass scene as artists are exposed to non-linear methods, modular tools and alternate ways of perceiving and utilizing glass.

Participating artists - Aimee Sones . Alexander Rosenberg . Amy Rueffert . Andrew Bearnot . Angus M. Powers . Anna Mlasowsky . Beccy Feather . Benjamin Bray . Bill Bahmerman . Bohyun Yoon . Carrie McIlwain . Helen Lee . Jin Won Han . Joel O'Dorisio . Justin Braun . Keunae Song . Min Jeong Song . Maria del Carmen Montoya . Naomi Kaly . Peter Garfield . Rebecca Cummins . Rika Hawes . Robin Rogers . Thomas (Ryan) Gothrup . Samuel F. Geer . Sean Salstrom . Solange Ledwith . Stefanie Pender . Stine Bidstrup . Suzanne Peck.

Light Sculpture by Sydney Cash

2009-05-04T22:36:00.002-04:00

Bubbles: oil in water / air in glass

2009-04-27T23:20:00.000-04:00

Oil in Water from Shawn Knol on Vimeo.

Traces of the molten state-by Etsuko Ichikawa

2009-04-13T21:24:00.001-04:00

Traces of the Molten State from Etsuko Ichikawa on Vimeo.

Artist: W. Benjamin Bray

2009-03-02T00:37:00.003-05:00

Modes of Departure(2008)
Video Installation dimensions variable

Sound from inside aircraft taxiing for departure is played from speakers situated in
forms resembling jet engine nacelles, while video volumes, each comprised of
images representing one of the five distinct periods of transience throughout
artist's life, are projected into the nacelles, where each reflects off of a mirrored
speaker cone and onto a nacelle's interior walls.
The energy and feeling of departure affects the perception of reality.

Artist: Rebecca Cummins

2009-03-02T00:29:00.006-05:00

"Shooting Stars", 2007
inkjet print on acrylic, 24H x 36W

Artist:Jessica Lloyd-Jones

2009-03-02T00:22:00.004-05:00

A series of framed photographic prints:
Image 1
Photogram of light bulb and botanical roots. Developed from the presence of
electrical activity in plants and animals.
Image 2
The northern lights captured within a chemistry lab bottle filled with argon
gas and lit by the presence of electricity. The bottle evokes the mystique of
ancient magic and alchemy and the ‘chemistry’ of the earths’ atmosphere.
Image 3
Blown Glass anatomical model of the heart containing gas charged with
electricity.

Artist: Suzanne Peck

2009-03-02T00:11:00.002-05:00

Sink or Swim(2007/8)
Digital video, Chlorine (variable dimensions)

A room-darkened and warm- reeks of damp air and a hint of chlorine. The
moving image on the wall features a woman’s body gliding through aqua water.
The atmosphere grows incresingly familiar as the chlorine smell intensifies and
passes, the air is thick. The woman is fragmented, here glides her back, there
a leg, a shot of both arms propelling her slowly through the water.
There are unfamiliar objects the woman is wearing, making sound in the water
amidst her breathing. Glass tubes surrounding her limbs, clinking against each
other, keeping her afloat.

Artist: J. Susie Hwang

2009-03-02T00:04:00.002-05:00

Ritual Residue(2009)
Clay, body, video, glass (variable dimensions; min 12 sq ft floor)

A series of clay imprints (12-16 tiles, each 3 sqft max) are cast in glass,
thereby mapping the demographics, traffic, and populous of a certain hub.
The glass tiles will be placed in the four corners of a room , each labeled with
the sidewalk locations, ie: 21st Street and 8th Ave. Chelsea: New York, New
York.
Video may be a part of this process. The traffic may be recorded and
manipulated to create a subsequent video piece which may become part of
the installation.
Note: The artist is most interested in creating the tiles on-the-cuff using traffic
patterns in the city of Corning, the work thereby morphing into a sort of
guerilla ‘doormat’ project.

Artist:Stine Bidstrup

2009-03-01T23:59:00.006-05:00

Sights and Sites for Corning, New York(2009)
Glass, water (variable dimensions)

A group of organic, blown glass blobs, will be placed without particular fanfare
or explanation into a public setting. When filled with water, they reflect
the surrounding environment upside-down, and are subject to ephemeral
phenomenological experience: changing light, the season, the angle of view
and so on.
The life of the work may be short i.e. removed by public authorities
or ‘appropriated’ by passers-by (taken home by people), or, be allowed to
exist in the public realm for a longer period of time, picking up the traces
of outdoor weather, eg. microbiological processes aided by sunlight causing
growth in the water, or evaporation that leaves traces on the insides of the
glass.

Artist: Stefanie Pender

2009-03-01T23:40:00.006-05:00

Resonance (2007)
Video Projection (1 minute 53 seconds)

A voice sings at the resonant frequency
of the glass that causes the glass to
oscillate. The inanimate becomes animate when invisible sound waves create
movement within a static glass.

Artist: Solange Ledwith

2009-03-01T22:13:00.002-05:00

Human Glass Wrap (2007)
Performance / video

This performance uses the body, wet newspaper and hot glass. The body,
encompassed by media, words, articles, and breaking news; the stuff in
our everyday lives that assist in forming who and what we are, is dressed/
wrapped with hot glass.
Ultimately, the roles of the materials are reversed: the protective skin of
paper symbolizes the bombardment of media and the subliminal toll that it
takes on the individual and the seemingly “dangerous” material (hot glass) in
actuality imposes no threat.

Artist: Sealen Sallee

2009-03-01T22:09:00.002-05:00

Title options: * The Finite Possibilities of One: the biography of a cup.
* A Transcontinental Glass * I’m in a Long Distance Glassblowing
Partnership (or a simpler variant) * Re:blow (2009)
Glass, digital image/video (Dimensions n.a)

This project traces the dissolution or disappearance of an object, a cup,
made over and over again using the same piece of glass, as it goes back and
forth between the two artists. Preliminary ideas to present this work include:
* A photographic biography of the cup in the form of multiple exposure
photographs, and an ctual shelf which will hold only the final cup remaining.
* A book documenting all aspects of the project
* A collector’s set of postcards featuring the glass in its various stages of
transformation. Viewers may purchase postcard sets and continue to send
our glasses in the mail to friends and loved ones.
* An installation comprising all packing materials used iin the process.
* A video made by stitching together stills of the various cups so its demise
happening in time is visible.

Artist: Samuel Geer

2009-03-01T22:05:00.004-05:00

Dervish (date n.a)
Mixed media (4’ x 8’ x 8’)

A bicycle wheel spins horizontally at the end of a motor-driven shaft mounted
on a cart. The machien is surrounded by removable walls and floor.
Molten glass is poured over the wheel as it rotates, causing the glass to
splatter and resulting in action-paintings on the walls.
The walls are removed and glass threads - frozen along their path while
spinning on the wheel - remain.

Artist: Ryan Gothrup

2009-03-01T21:48:00.003-05:00

title n/a(2008)
video installation

Fifteen blown and painted glass basketballs are mixed with real ones, and
shot into a basketball net in a park. Seen as video, the viewer will not be
able to distinguish between a glass ball and real basketball until the (glass)
ball breaks. The video will play on several monitors (3-9) and the action
seen via multiple camera perspectives. A glass basketball may be placed on a
basketball rack.

Artist: Robin Rogers

2009-03-01T21:43:00.001-05:00

Portals (date n.a)
Glass, sound, electronics (variable dimensions)

Up to thirty globes are disbursed throughout the gallery in clusters of three.
Each globe contains a speaker and a led light. The speakers emit sounds,
bouncing off of the glass’s surface and the leds light up in response.
As each pod broadcats a different sound, each gathered from the everyday
lives of collaborators, thirty viewers could be simultaneously having thirty
different auditory experiences from the lives of thirty collaborators.
The piece is controlled by a PC with multiple sound cards running software
that feeds sounds to the spheres.

Artist: Peter Garfield

2009-03-01T21:38:00.002-05:00

The Grotto of the (Self-Reflective) Futurist Duck (working title) (date n.a)
mixed media with borken mirrored glass (n.a)

The shattered remains of an earthenware duck are dispersed into space at
the extremities of bits of wire, as if suspended in motion immediately after an
explosion. The duck emerges, mock-heroically, from a shattered sunset, beak
open, emitting its silent call.
The work in interested in the beauty of “dirty” glass, glass that would normally
no longer have a function or aesthetic.

Artist: Naomi Kaly

2009-03-01T21:14:00.004-05:00

It’s not a book (date n.a)
Glass, digital projection, audio

Projected on a translucent glass, is a video of the artist, writing an English
text in the opposite direction of convention (i.e.right to left); When mirrored,
one’s own language becomes opaque. To decipher the text, viewers
use the ’rear’ side of the glass.
Charcoal sound confronts the unmediated material world of handwriting,
with the digital, intangible, modern version. Facilitated by digital tools, the
glass becomes a virtual page emphasizing the ephemerality of language.

Artist: Min Song

2009-03-01T19:03:00.006-05:00

untitled (2009)

An experiment into the relationship between visual perspective
and the sense of time and space, the proposed work uses
images on glass panes as filters, and mobile lighting sources such as
sunlight. Viewers may choose and alter images by layering panes
of glass and manipulating light. Based on this action
and lighting source, shadows and reflected images
will appear on the wall behind the objects.
eg. Images of the sky at one location(cityscape) at several
time intervals(sunrise, day, sunset, night…) are etched on the
surface of flat glass. The animated light source re-creates
and dislocates the scene of the cityscape (sunlight with shadow).

Artist: Michelle Coelho

2009-03-01T18:50:00.002-05:00

Pull me, stretch me, what does it say (date n.a)
Pegboard, elastic, ink, and staples (variable dimensions)

Words, phrases and poems, collected over a period of time,
are witten with ink on stretched rubberbands.
As the rubber band returns to its unstretched
condition, the text shrinks and may not be decoded
until the process of stretching the elastic is undertaken.
The artist proposes to collect information posted on
http://howisthisglass.blogspot.com/, the blog dedicated
to this exhibition. She will transfer text
from the site onto elastic bands.

Artist: Linda Diec

2009-03-01T18:42:00.003-05:00

title n.a (2009)
Ice, mixed media
Packets of mundane materials are embedded in a large block of ice (roughly
2’ x 2’). These packets reveal themselves as time goes by. Some release
fragrances; some are mementos from past events; some may react with the
newly melted ice. The resultant water and contents are recollected. A video
camera and Polaroid documents a step-by-step progression of events for
viewers.

Artist: Keunae Song

2009-03-01T18:27:00.004-05:00

The way of reading a space, #304 (Date n.a)
Installation with glass, speakers, projector

In a dark space, the sound of hearing something flipping away is
the only way to perceive the moment without being able to see
it source. Soon, the viewer encounters someone’s eye balls that
appear to be looking at the object creating the sound.
The viewer might follow the movement of these eyes to get the sense
of source. When one looks at the eyeballs close
enough, one can see the reflected images of the artist flipping
a tiny glass bead in a black space.
Upon exiting the installation space, a small white camera
- as though a miscroscope- shows the viewer a tiny glass bead with
the image of a person (whose eyeballs were projected in the space)
sitting on a chair in the middle
of the space, thereby, seeing what was missed from the disorienting,
illusory experience of the installation.

Artist: Keunae Song

2009-02-18T12:04:00.009-05:00

Title n/a
Digital Video

The artist inflates a yellow balloon slowly using her breath. As the balloon
gets bigger, its walls become transluscent and resemble a glass-like
membrane. However, unlike hot glass, the balloon pops and all of a sudden,
the artist is left with nothing.

Artist: Justin Braun

2009-02-18T02:10:00.008-05:00

Living Language
Blood, aluminum, stainless steel, gass

Part of the Living Language series, the work is comprised of glass plates
that are sandblasted and hold the artist’s fresh blood. The plates are held
in space by machined aluminum components and hand made laboratory
equipment.

Artist: Carrie McILwain+Solange Ledwith

2009-02-15T20:08:00.003-05:00

Shed (2006)
Digital Video

The narrative of the video is centered on a girl attempting to relax
in the bath. This is interrupted by a surrealist emergence;
the water transforms into glass and overwhelms the girl.
Shed uses video and stop animation.

Artist: Joel O'Dorisio

2009-02-15T19:58:00.005-05:00

Gold Rush (in progress)

Artist: Joel O'Dorisio

2009-02-15T19:48:00.006-05:00

Gold Rush (2009)
Mixed Media, video(7x6x8ft)

Three 7’ x 4’ glass panels arranged in half of a hexagonal
pattern \__/ house a small tree that has been stripped of it’s bark.
On each frosted glass panel is the rear projection of one view of a
spring stream in a snow storm : Cold water will rush toward
the viewer, past the viewer, then away from the viewer.
Gold rush is currently being produced, and supporting
media will be provided as the project develops.

Artist: Jin Won Han

2009-02-15T19:36:00.006-05:00

Dream Space (2008-09)
Performance / act OR prints (Variable dimensions)

A work table with a flameworking torch setup is in the middle
of a small room. A person is pulling long and thin glass canes
with the torch, and hanging them in the room. The action looks
like tedious daily labor--like hanging a curtain or
laundry that being hung dry. He/she repeats the action until the room,
filled with the clear canes, looks webby and ghostly.
The person stops when there is no more space to hang canes onto.
The person is stuck in the middle of the room, calm in his/her
private space. Then, voicing the opposite desire to
destroy it, he/she crashes the web to make a way
out of the room. If performed, the process of hanging will take
about 8 hours. The video will show a part of the making process,
the moment of entrapment, and the final escape.

Artist:Helen Lee

2009-02-11T21:17:00.006-05:00

Tumbler
2009
Video Installation

Shot from a camera attached to a blowpipe, this video installation provides an intimate perspective of the physical acts of manual tedium that comprise the practice of blowing glass. The act of "turning" a pipe is foregrounded as the primary means of counteracting gravity—an activity as fundamental as breathing in the practice of glassblowing. Viewers have the opportunity to experience the action of turning a pipe in response to the video with their own bodies, which, in turn, alters the projected image, creating an analogous feedback loop.

Artist: Carmen Montoya and Naomi Kaly

2009-02-11T21:13:00.003-05:00

Wonderbox (2009)
Wood, ground glass,
toys (8 x 10 x 1 ft)

A large poplar box with pristine golden finish is filled
with pounds of finely ground tan glass, resembling sand.
The sandbox is presented out doors, or in the gallery space,
inviting visitors to engage with it in any way they wish,
some may look, some may touch, others may refuse
it altogether. Ambient lighting, be it sky or bulb, accentuates
the glistening quality of the material itself.
People are invited to explore this unexpected
state of glass: ‘sharp’ as soft, ‘solid’ as granular.

Exhibiting Artists: Bohyun Yoon

2009-02-11T21:01:00.009-05:00

Boundary (2007)
Mixed media, spotlights, screen
(Each mirror 127 x 56 cm)

Two mirrors that have slight textures
(male & female nude pictures)
on the surface reflect a spotlight onto
a translucent screen between them.
The two refractions from each mirror merge at
this screen if no one obstructs the light source. (Image 1)
However, if a viewer stands and blocks the light from
one side of the mirror, the image will project only
a male on the screen; and if the viewer switches to
the opposite place, then it will project only a
female on the other side of the screen.

This work is an interaction with the viewer’s
movement in the space; a person will engage in
both looking at his reflection on the mirror
and his projected image on the screen.

Exhibiting Artists: Bill Bahmerman

2009-02-08T19:39:00.006-05:00

The aesthetic properties of glass-gloss or matte, reflection, refraction, glazed color,
fluidity of form-are explored in the virtual world, which transcends some of the physical
limitations of glass while retaining its beauty and essense.

The digital prints exhibited are all computer generated, either by algorithmic
3d or computer paint, and involve a close study of the properties
of glass, often unnecessary in the direct experience of working
with the medium itself

Exhibiting Artists: Carmen Montoya and Naomi Kaly

2009-02-07T19:17:00.008-05:00

Honne and Tatemae (2009)
Performance with powdered glass for digital video

A wooden bowl sits on a simple gallery pedestal. It is filled with finely
ground glass, closely resembling white powder makeup.
Lighting amplifies thereflective attributes of the glass.
Behind, on the wall a large video projection
shows a body to which powdered glass is being applied.
The glass hides the true face and conceals feelings, desires
and motives. At the conclusion of the
video loop the woman is blank, unrecognizable.
Visitors are invited to wonder at the unexpected
consistency of this glass, the vagueness of transparency
and perhaps even the fluidity of human nature.

Exhibiting Artists: Beccy Feather

2009-02-06T01:32:00.004-05:00

Ultra Shiny Infomercial:

Exhibiting Artists: Beccy Feather

2009-02-06T01:24:00.006-05:00

Ultra Shiny (2009)
Glass, stickers, advertising campaign

‘Ultra Shiny’ is a new and exciting product tag from
MondoNew Technologies that captializes on the perception
of glass in the eyes of the neophyte. Stickers claiming ‘Ultra Shinyness’
are placed onto glass products which are otherwise second rate.
The project, using now-ubiquitous forms of product
advertsiing to explore glass through the lens of both promise
and misdirection, encompasses: Glassware including a range of
stickers with marketing slogans.
Marketing materials: ‘Ultra Shiny’ business cards, t-shirts, baseball
caps, rubber stamps, car door magnets, Evidence of product placement
in the marketplace, i.e. www.etsy.com, www.ebay.com, etc and a
Wikipedia page devoted to Ultra Shiny.
Trade show attendance. A clever advertising campaign.

Exhibiting Artists: Anna Mlasowsky

2009-02-03T22:07:00.003-05:00

Interaction And Action(2009)
Blown glass, hardware, participant (16.5'x16.4'x variable height)

The proposed project aims to blur the “I make, you watch” line between an
artist and a viewer using the common non-verbal language of making.
A room is installed with simple blown glass pieces, sticking out of the floor
and hanging on the wall. The objects are moveable; they may be taken out of
/ into or relocated within the room to change the installation.

Exhibiting Artists: Anna Mlasowsky

2009-02-02T16:30:00.004-05:00

Pain, Written in Blood

Glass pen, glass bag and rubber tubes with needle, written letter, video
Possibly performance

The performance will be submitted as a video alongwith the materials used
to make the performance: Glass pen, glass bag and rubber tubes with needle,
written letter.
The video features a person, seated and writing with her own blood. Blood
from the left arm will be taken with a needle. The blood runs throuh rubber
tubes to a glass bloodbag, were it gets thinned out and transfered through
another tube into a glass pen the person is holding in her right hand, writing.

Exhibiting Artists: Angus Powers

2009-02-02T16:02:00.005-05:00

Objects Empowered; Glasses of Action/Context (working title, 2009)
Glass, printed text, digital print / video

The proposed work comprises a series of simple drinking cups, each
conceptually “activated” by a controlled environment and context of
production that will empower each object in the final presentation.
egs. * Downhill Glassblowing---production of a cup while rolling on mobile
glass bench (image 1) * Tandem Glassblowing---production of 2 glass cups
at once on a single double-ended blowpipe (image 2) * Long Distance
Glassblowing--- production of a cup via a 300 foot rubber hose with blow
partner on a cell phone * Retail Redefined Glassblowing---a glass cup made
from melted down Wal-Mart drinking glasses * Floating Glassblowing---a
glass cup made while in a canoe.
The environments and contexts will range from humorous to serious, and be
both fun and thoughtful. In presentation, each cup is coupled with descriptive
reference to the context and a large digital print.

Exhibiting Artists: Andrew Bearnot

2009-02-01T14:42:00.009-05:00

Mutable Cup (2007)
Video

A rubber goblet performs feats unknown to her glass counterpart, and
makes visible the action of touch.
It is an attempt to reanimate the glass.

Exhibiting Artists: Andrew Bearnot

2009-01-31T14:08:00.003-05:00

Ballet Verrerie (Glassworks Ballet), Premiere Performance November 2007
2 framed, digital prints (18x27 inches)

The Ballet Verrerie is a new dance company that pays homage to the glass
craftsman by developing and performing dances inspired by the sinuous
and graceful movements of the maestro.
The Ballet Verrerie reveals the logic and grace of these movements, but also
to explore their illogical fascination and allure.

Exhibiting Artists: Amy Ruffert

2009-01-31T13:55:00.006-05:00

Title N/A (2006)
Large format digital photographs, glass

This body of work explores inorganic (and sometimes organic) objects
reconceived as natural specimens in a state of melting, dripping, or bleeding. In
a world of material abundance, how would we change our lives if the objects
around us experienced feeling? How would we view things if they were
living—or possibly dying?

Exhibiting Artists: Alexander Rosenberg

2009-01-31T13:42:00.003-05:00

To Fly
Glass, flies, audio

The project is concerned with an amateur approach to flight. (i.e to achieving
flight by catching thousands of flies and tying them to the artist’s body using
a special flight suit.)
This section of the project includes the collection of simplified fly catchers
and the sound of the volume of flies that would fill them

Artist: Alexander Rosenberg

2009-01-30T22:57:00.009-05:00

Drawing 2 - Original footage with the animation over it

Artist: Alexander Rosenberg

2009-01-30T22:05:00.010-05:00

Drawing 2 (2008)
Glass bowls, digital projections, steel armature

Motion-tracking software and a particle generator plot the line made by
glass on the end of the pipe in the process of making a low bowl. (Image 1).
The animated line is projected into the sand-blasted interior of the bowl
created in the video. The bowl is suspended in a steel armature (image 2).
Image 3 shows the various “drawings” that appear on the inside of the bowl.
The original footage with the animation over it (video stillas inset image)is
shown in the room as well, somewhat removed from the abstracted version.

Artist: Aimee Sones

2009-01-30T21:50:00.007-05:00

Untitled Proposal(2009) Glass, sugar, candy, packing

Digital elevation model (DEM) for the Corning, NY area are used to make
miniature souvenir landscapes in clear hard candy and a limited edition in
glass, for the both low and high end consumer. To be sold in a variety of
locations ranging from candy stores and gifts shops to galleries.
Possibilites :
Connors Market Street Mercantile @ 16 East Market Street
The School House Country Store @ 22 East Market Street
Market Street Coffee & Tea @ 61 East Market Street.

The End of Studio Glass?

2009-01-13T23:02:00.005-05:00

Even before a birth of the term, Post-Glass Art, a New York based writer, William Warmus
stated "the end" of the Studio Glass in 1995.
The following essay is excerpted from "The End?" an essay by William Warmus, which is on his website:
http://www.warmus.us/The%20End%20essay%20Warmus.htm

THE END?

Studio glass has its beginning and end in America, where the present situation offers opportunities in two directions. Looking back, historians have an obligation to write the history of studio glass and establish its key figures, its first wave. Looking to the future, artists have the opportunity to incorporate the technical legacy of studio glass into new narratives.

Studio glass is at a pivotal point in its history. The recognition of established masters including Tom Patti and Dale Chihuly (the alpha and omega of technique and marketing), Richard Marquis and Dan Dailey (our humorists), Paul Stankard and Mark Peiser (pioneering naturalists), Howard Ben Tre, Mary Shaffer and Marvin Lipofsky (all sculptors) and the increasing attention paid to their work by writers, museums and collectors indicates the passing of the era of isolated innovation within the field. First wave work has the fresh, innocent quality typical of profound innovation and when the history of studio glass is written, the period from roughly the founding of the Glass Art Society in 1971 into the late 1980s will be theirs as originators and educators. And as innovators, they became the ones to challenge.

Originally, the concept of the glass artist working alone in the studio made sense as a way of moving beyond the meaningless and unproductive traditions that Harvey Littleton and others sought to escape, as they existed in the confines of the 1950s glass factory, which had become highly commercialized and unresponsive to artist’s needs. This led to a period of intense technical and stylistic innovation as studio glassmakers slowly reinvented the factory concepts of continuous technical experimentation, teamwork, efficient organization of space, refinement through repetition. Now the early masters of studio glass have become the champions of its traditions. The criticism leveled against many of these artists--that they do not change--no longer seems valid as time reveals the diversity of work produced during their careers. Significantly, these pioneering figures may now be seen as justified in consolidating their positions: they almost have a duty to perfect and publish techniques that took decades to refine.

We have perhaps forgotten that studio glass is largely about technique and broadening the definition of the factory: although it began in the United States as a way to get the creative glassmaker out of industry and into a pristine studio, it was also a way to put the artist back in control of techniques and some kind of factory. Today artists like Dale Chihuly and Dan Dailey are the direct heirs to Tiffany and Galle who, in the words of Harvey Littleton, “were trained as artists and had chosen glass, but [who] chose to work within the framework of factories that they founded, factories that were totally under their control so that they made very exciting things”. This is why studio glass begins and ends in America, where glassmakers first felt expelled from industry and where many now control their own homemade factories.

Most art movements last only a generation and the styles grouped together under the term studio glass are not exempt. Exceptional is the fact that new waves of studio glassmakers and collectors often behave as if their world will continue to evolve at the rapid pace set by the early innovators. This leads to the marketing of “innovations” that repeat, sometimes unknowingly, the early successes of the first wave. The terrain of studio glass is only now being charted, its circumference and boundaries measured, our susceptibility to imitations lessened. Criticism of glass exists, but is sporadic and tends to be published in specialized journals. We need forceful criticism as a gauge of originality and corrective to excesses, whether of taste, price, or commercialism. Forget the endlessly distracting quarrels over “Is it Art?” We need critics and historians to engage in the debates from which consensus will emerge about the key artists and objects of the studio glass era, even if some turn out to be industrial designers, some objects made by production studios. And we desperately need critics who will generously champion and defend the individuals they support.

I would venture to suggest that when the history of studio glass is written, significant accomplishments will include the growth of a community, the emergence within this community of innovative approaches to the marketplace, and the cultivation of maximum diversity within the medium itself.

Communities grow from a mixture of common attributes and interest, and I challenge readers to find any art communities that are more unified than the one focused on glass. As the American art scene expanded from the 1960s onward it became increasingly difficult to capture the sense of community shared by earlier groups such as the abstract expressionists, unified by location (New York and the Hamptons), dealers (Peggy Guggenheim), collectors, and critics (Greenberg and Rosenberg). The current art situation mirrors the present political situation in the United States: it is too diverse and factional to be called a community in the traditional sense. But the glass world, the glass ghetto so disparaged in some circles, is not. It has remained a community on the order of the earlier ones that are now disbanded. That is something to celebrate, not dismiss and discourage. If you are an insider and have forgotten the warmth of individual members and the strength of the crowd, or a newcomer and want to see for yourself, visit any of the great gatherings of the clan (the phrase of one prominent critic): the October Pilchuck School benefit auction, the springtime Glass Art Society conferences, the great exhibition and collector reunion at SOFA Chicago every fall.

The market for studio glass matured from roughly 1979-1989, led by legendary dealers, notably Ferdinand Hampson and Douglas Heller, who in many ways took the place of art critics as promoters of the “new glass”. In my mind, the key innovation in this market was the development of a close knit and highly involved community of collectors on a national (not regional) scale, unlike anything in the artworld, who for many reasons found that they enjoyed each other’s company, enjoyed taking glassblowing lessons, founding philanthropic societies to support emerging artists, etc.. Many were couples who collected as a means of enhancing a relationship, and many collectors were successful business people who brought a benignly competitive approach to acquiring studio glass.

Since 1990, stagnation has been evident. Many of the founding collectors have built large, mature collections and consequently are less active. Impersonal forces, primarily discounting and studio sales, drive the nineties market and have taken the lead away from pro-active dealers and collectors: who are the new Hampsons, Hellers and Saxes of the nineties? What are the bold moves, such as opening a gallery in SoHo or energizing a major art museum (Toledo) to renew its support for contemporary glass? There are certainly signs of optimism, as some members of the new generation of studio glassmakers have been able to raise their prices by showing in a fine arts context where prices are traditionally higher. But should we be optimistic that the studio glass community and market is increasingly driven by external forces, and no longer by its own internal momentum, which now seems dissipated?

Art communities are defined more by shared aspirations than shared achievements, which tend to be recognized as individual. As leading figures in studio glass achieve national attention and distance themselves from their origins, the aspirations of the community become diffused and susceptible to sentimentalizing. Now, as younger artists working with studio glass techniques develop stronger roots in the art world, signs of disintegration are only emphasized. Their aspirations lie elsewhere, as may their community ties. This is inevitable: communities are destined to dissolve or evolve. And while the ever present fear in political communities, republican or democratic, is that they will succumb to tyranny, art communities might rightly fear more the effects of neglect and marginalization. The pond may be drying up.

The glassmakers who came after the first wave and matured in the 1980s, as well as those now entering the field, face a daunting situation. Stagnation, exhaustion and lack of direction are words applied in the 1990s not only to studio glass, but to all aspects of life in the United States. The end of the cold war has unmasked the decay of moral values in nations on both sides of the iron curtain. Artists, aware of the changes within society, have documented this corruption. Pathological art, art about the sickness of society, has replaced the avant-garde art in the mainstream. Are we witnessing the desperate end of an era, or a stillborn birth?

Studio glass itself is not stagnant, it is complete. There is an uncanny parallel between the development of studio glass and of glass blowing in ancient Rome. As Donald Harden noticed, in writing for The Glass of the Caesars, “There must have been some experimenting before glass-blowing became accepted and well understood by glassworkers... but ...within twenty or thirty years they proved capable of developing almost all the inflation techniques still present nearly 2,000 years later in the workshops of their modern successors.” I believe the argument can be made that the period of innovation in studio glass, roughly from 1962 through the end of the nineteen eighties, was the most significant period in the history of glass since Roman times.

The significance of studio glass may be its cultivation of and openness to diversity, not in an ethnic sense but in a technical, material one. The preserve of glass is everywhere, not just in the artworld. Sometimes it seems that glassmakers make things for no reason at all except the technical challenge, but in fact studio glassmakers are willing heirs to a long and mixed tradition of craftmakers, artists, souvenir shops, anomalous extra-artistic stuff, stuff so beautiful or unusual or peculiar that glass has become a loose cannon among media: it is unpredictable how any glass object will be appreciated once it is made. The unpredictable beauty inherent in glass means that an extreme surplus of value may at any moment be attached to any object: a factory made souvenir or the damaged 200 inch telescope mirror blank on display at The Corning Glass Center. This suggests that some of the best works in glass are not necessarily magnificent works, but those that inspire magnificently. These may be turned out by many different kinds of studios, and it is the willingness of many to accept this diversity that has kept the community vital.

Will another 2,000 years be required before the word new can again be applied to glass making? The confused and incomplete styles of art we see emerging from glass studios today are indicative of experimental, transitional, rococo and mannerist work that, in moving away from studio glass traditions, has yet to establish its own identity. Some of the best work has simply taken its place in the art world in general and is unrecognizable as studio glass: Christopher Wilmarth, never a studio glassmaker, led the way in this direction.

Despite the success of Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” glass as a material for art has never been comfortable in association with the avant-garde or its pathological successors (even Galle, the sickliest of glassmakers, asserted the vitality of nature through his symbolism). Art glass that imitates the look and actions of the avant-garde appears immature and kitschy or stale and pompous. Maybe glass is too inherently healthy, glassmakers too accepting of diversity, to fully participate in the current art scene. Tiffany and Galle may yet emerge as more central to glass than Duchamp or neo-expressionism.

Perhaps the most promising glassmakers are now renovating venerable glassmaking traditions by producing vessels and figures within a narrative art that has links to traditional storytelling. Maybe the word renovation will come to replace the word deconstruction as a mantra for the nineties. The interest in narration, in narrative art, is significant for renovation: retelling is a means of renewal. Narration promises to be the tool that is added to the “technical” tools developed by studio glassmakers over the last 30-odd years, a tool that is necessary for retrieving lost legacies and for opening up future horizons. As Paul Ricoeur, the essential philosopher of narrative, wrote: “Making and narrating have become the two sides of one process.”

Today, making glass and narrating are the two sides of one process. Yet narrative studio glass should not be weakened by narrowing its definition to a sort of three-dimensional storytelling or by appropriating to itself the roles of painting and sculpture as documentarians of the pathological and the unhealthy. The role of narrative in glass, like the role of telescopes in astronomy, should be nothing less than the humanization of time and space, so that we can make a home in the expanding universe. This project promises to establish for glass a role independent from the other arts.

Post-Glass artists : Who are they? *

2009-01-04T17:30:00.004-05:00

Most of us who work with glass know that the "do not touch hot glass" phrase is a golden rule. Post-glass artists do not. Most of us have a basic common sense that eliminates the need for announcements such as, Warning: glass is hot! Post -glass artists do not. The works featured in the proposed exhibition will show that common sense is (thankfully) over-rated and that there are individuals who challenge what seems like a common rule to change the notions and perceptions of working in glass.

There are people who think it is perfectly practical to gather hot sugar around a pipe instead of glass and eat the resultant work. There are people who have used reflective contact lenses which do not clarify but preclude their own vision and instead, act as a mirror for the person standing at front. There are people who play music to hot glass as it cools.... We applaud the unpredictable ways in which these artists open our minds up to possibility.

A post-glass artist or Glass guerilla is what happens when people who either are bewilderingly unable or desire not to cope with obvious, well-established, perfectly reasonable techniques and methods laid out for them by time and history and tradition, come together in a post-modern world; a post-modern world of which ubiquitous new media is an integral part.

An artist who makes an elaborate glass object is a post-glass artist when she desires only to show its photoexposed print. Or is able to pass off as a glass object, that which is not. As is an artist who projects moving images onto large blocks of ice, only to watch them - and the image - melt away, just like the dissipation of heat in glass at the end of a pipe. As is a person who contaminates glass with flour and eggs from baking recipes to create bread-like objects, only to grow mold on them. The integrity of the work in many cases, is evident best in responsive environments and preserved through time-based media.

Post-glass artists envision and carry out schemes that an average person can tell are either a bad idea or has nothing to do with glass itself. They contrive, usually unwittingly, to eliminate themselves from traditional channels of exhibition and collection of glass works. This is done in such an innovative, idiosyncratic or extraordinary manner, that their action ensures our attention, curiosity and support. The unusual methods, processes and ways of thinking in which these artists explore their ideas, qualifies them as a post-glass artist or glass guerilla.

And the exhibition that will open in Corning NY in June 2009 will present recent works by such artists.

* this blog entry emulates (in style) the definition of the Darwin award winners.

the building that was an apparition

2008-10-03T13:26:00.000-04:00

works by Yagi Lyota

2008-10-02T21:14:00.002-04:00

A gramophone record made of ice starts to melt, suggesting that recorded music disappears

by being played. A turntable with record revolves, playing a sigular tone, while being used as potter's wheel to make porcelain, reborn as a music device to change tone to be itself.

Yagi Lyota creates sound pieces, objects and videos, both in installation and interactive works, using a variety of methods. He employs familiar goods, such as books, records or daily items as his subject, then re-reads and re-edits their functions, to humorously suggest other meanings. The record made of ice starts to melt as soon as it starts to play, and its recorded music is instantly lost. One could call it a very imperfect recording medium. Another piece allows us to

listen directly to the engraved sound ,as vibration, by putting a pencil point on the spinning record groove instead of the needle. A record disk as a sound object, to record above -sea sounds and undersea sounds on opposing sides of the record, the disc itself representing the water's surface, as an existence which belongs to both worlds; an extremely thin membrane...

original text excerpted from ICC Online:

http://www.ntticc.or.jp/

Alicia Keys: "I basically drip the cells over the glass and they stick to the surface and they slowly start to grow and spread out...

2008-09-26T21:04:00.002-04:00

Artist's skin cell work cultivates concern

There is outrage at a Hobart artist's move to cultivate skin cells for art.

Alicia King has received ethical clearance to use her own cells and those of consenting patients at the Royal Hobart Hospital.

The artwork involves growing skin cells over glass forms, and fixing and dying them before they are added to an art piece.

"I basically drip the cells over the glass and they stick to the surface and they slowly start to grow and spread out until there is a thin membrane," she said.

"It's quite hard to see with the naked eye so I dye it with a tissue culture dye."

It has taken the University of Tasmania's Human Research and Ethics Board six months to approve King's application to use her own cells for the mixed-medium work.

"It's much more clear-cut with ethics if I am using my own," she said.

"There is no issues of consent that are there with animal tissue."

The clearance also means waste tissue from consenting patients at the Royal Hobart Hospital can be used.

But the hospital says it is inappropriate and has refused permission.

An exhibition of the work opens in Melbourne tomorrow.

(ABC News online Aug 16, 2006)

glass grows!

2008-07-27T01:49:00.002-04:00

Anyone who knows of or makes work where the pristine, immortal, clinical and casteless associations of glass are transgressed.....Please post links.

We need for glass to grow... and very literally.

"Slow Glass"

2008-07-05T21:49:00.007-04:00

A show at Lisa Cooley Fine Art

http://www.lisa-cooley.com

Slow Glass takes its theme from the titular substance, an invention of scence fiction writer BobShaw described in his novel Light of Other Days(1968). Slow Glass is a transparent material that tremendously slows down the speed of light that passes through it, so that a piece that had looked out

on a picturesque countryside setting, for example, could later be used to provide a view of the pastoral scene from a city apartment window.

In Shaw's novel, slow glass plays a key role as evidence in a mystery by

"recording" a criminal act.

Article excerpted from New York Art Beat: http://www.nyartbeat.com/

CALL FOR ENTRIES

2008-06-29T13:56:00.002-04:00

Exhibition and catalog (working title): Post-Glass Artists / Glass Guerillas
Exhibition date and location : June 2009, Corning NY
Deadline for submissions : Oct 01, 2008

Description:

Post-glass Artists / Glass Guerillas questions the adequacy of the current definition of a glass artist, its associations and implications, in light of the studio practice of a significant number of emerging artists.

We are looking for works that toy with the idea of “guerilla intervention” in glass practice. For example, the method or production of your work may use the vocabulary and tools of alternative media rather than glass; the final form of work may not be glass. Perhaps, not even an object. Or maybe the object is made of glass but behaves in a remarkably un-glass-like manner. Maybe the outcome of your artistic process or its mode of distribution exceeds the focus of conventional glass art channels(throughsay, street performance).
We seek works whose concepts are unarguably derived from the direct experience of working in the medium of glass and yet, are risk-taking in their approach. They are hard to accept in conventional glass art avenues, challenging to existing discourse and uncomfortable or unfamiliar to encounter. To this end, we also welcome proposals.

To submit:

Please email yukanjali@gmail.com. You may submit upto 3 works/ideas for consideration. Indicate whether work or proposal in the subject line. In the main body of the email, include a brief description (upto 100 words) per submission and why you are interested in submitting (150 words total). For a proposal, send a written description of your project [max. 500words] with up to 3 images [drawings, pictures etc.] that exemplify the project.
Attach image/video/sound files as needed, less than 10MB. Please label the attachments as follows: yourlastname_entrynumber_imagenumber.fileformat (eg. genius_01_03.mov for a movie file sent by Jane Genius in support of submission 1 and image 3 within that submission). Do not forget to list contact information at the bottom of your email to us. Works that are of interest will be posted at http://howisthisglass.blogspot.com/ for open discussion, which you are welcome to join. For more information and questions about this project as it develops, please visit the blog or email us.

LIFE -fluid, invisible, inaudible...

2007-09-09T08:55:00.001-04:00

LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible ..."is a collaboration between world-renowned composer/ musician SAKAMOTO Ryuichi and TAKATANI Shiro, core member of the Kyoto-based internationally active art group dumb type.

While the genesis of this piece is in SAKAMOTO Ryuichi's opera "LIFE" (first performed in 1999, for which TAKATANI Shiro the video aspects) as is evident in the title's "fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." it revisits the resources of sound and vision in "LIFE" now,several years later, in this new millenium, for an entirely new deconstruction and evolution of the work. If we say that "LIFE" was an experiment conducted in opera's linear, modern form at the end of the 20th Century, then the installation configuration of "LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible..." must surely be a non-linear, decentralized flow of audio and visuals which the visitors themselves enter to experience.

A grid of 3 x 3 acrylic aquariums, 30cm high and 1.2m square are hung, in a darkened room. Each carries a thin film of water inside. Each has speakers affixed at both ends. Inside of each a fog is artificially created using ultrasonic waves, percolating fluid patterns which hover between transparency and opacity. Imagery transmitted down into these tanks from projectors attached above them--at times synchronizing all aquariums, at times decoupled and seemingly autonomous--shines down through this screen of kinetic patterns woven of water and fog, connecting the imagery while ceaselessly melting, floating endlessly between flows of meaning and meaninglessness, the concrete and the abstract.
The sounds and visions in "LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." including the newly added materials, are divided into categories of 20 and 30, and stored on a computer hard disk. Being run by a random control program, the audio and visual files are called up randomly from this depository, to create an installation which is constantly changing.

"I wanted to distance myself from the curse of time." (SAKAMOTO)
"I wanted the imagery to project completely free of control." (TAKATANI)

In both of their comments we can see their embrace of the emergent potential of the flowing phenomenon that is fog and the randomness of the computer to escape typically linear and conclusively established time and space.
*"LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." was produced as a commissioned work at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), and exhibited from March 10 to May 28 2007 at YCAM to great critical and popular acclaim.
http://rsst.ycam.jp/

original text derived from NTT ICC communication center
http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Exhibition/2007/LIFE_fii/preface.html

Perspectives offered by contemporaries

2007-08-09T12:15:00.000-04:00

Museum of Glass Presents Mining Glass (June 16, 2007 - February 3, 2008)

The Museum, in its press release claims," Glass may have been disregarded by twentieth century art as decorative, but today it is not simply a major medium in its own right, it is also one that opens new visions for the artists who are approaching and mining it."

Another excerpt: "Mining Glass is the first major survey to examine how the rich and unparalleled material of glass has expanded beyond its traditional application in decorative and functional art in the early twenty-first century.The installations are organized around eight narratives that act as suggested passages to help viewers see beyond the technical matters associated with the medium.By moving through the themes of artifice, boundaries, desire, enchantment, excess, identity, intersections, and landscape, the exhibition concentrates on the deeper issues that concern artists, allowing the meaning of the work to take precedence over the technique of how it has been executed. The featured artists, none of whom are glass artists, thus present a stunning diversity of approaches to the material to reveal the multiplicity of glass--precious, magical, and mystical, yet common, practical, and functional--while challenging the notion that work in glass is merely pretty."

Question is: "Merely pretty" ??? Heyyyy, what's wrong with pretty?

Question 1: How does our standpoint (in terms of "mining") differ? Is our take but a variation on postmodernist multiculturalism and hybridism? Are we interesting in the fundamental redefinition of glass through artistic practice? Or is it something else?

Image credits:
Jean-Michel Othoniel (French, born 1964), Black Hearts, Red Tears (detail), 2006-2007,
Blown glass and glass beads,
108 x 132 x 4 inches (274 x 335 x 10 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. Photo by Russell Johnson