GLASS

About

The works on view highlights the dichotomy between glass as a medium and as a found element.

The environment is the central concern of Maya Lin’s body of work. The exhibition will include a large-scale wall piece using glass marbles to trace the flow of water from Lake Powell to Lake Mead, two ecologically controversial reservoirs on the Colorado River system. GLASS marks the first time Lin’s glass marble work has been publicly displayed in New York and follows Folding the Chesapeake (2015), which was installed for the reopening at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Also on view will be Dew Point 11 (2007), a multi-unit floor piece comprised of clear blown glass discs resembling drops of water. The piece continues her use of glass to represent elements of nature, which began with blown glass representations of water-worn rocks that she collected at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, where she was artist-in-residence in 1994.

Kiki Smith explores themes of spirituality and the human condition. Decay, rebirth, and the eternal cycles of life recur throughout her work, often linking the body with the natural world and spiritual realm. She first turned to glass in the mid-1980s to extend her inquiries of the body, using the transparency of the material for depictions of internal anatomy. Her exploration of the medium continued with several residencies at Pilchuck, first in 1991, when she made prints using glass plates, and again in 1993, 1997 and 2003. Salvers and Teacups (1996) created during a residency at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, includes a variety of glassware placed on a surface of blue Nepalese handmade paper that is installed on the floor. Mine (1999), a floor piece of scattered three-dimensional red glass stars communicates the artist’s interest in the cosmos and the relation between the self and the universe.

With his work Fred Wilson challenges social and historical narratives regarding values, culture and race. Showing Wilson’s interest in methods of display is his installation Love and Loss in the Milky Way (2005), previously on view in the Hammer Museum of Art’s Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology at in Los Angeles. The installation is comprised of milk glass tableware placed alongside classical-style statuary and a cookie jar depicting a racial caricature. Recent black glass drips, which evolved out of his first experimentations in glass during his residency at Pilchuck in 2001, will also be included in the exhibition. The reflective surface of the blown glass and the teardrop-like forms suggest liquids such as ink, oil and tar. Wilson expanded his use of black glass in 2003, the year he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Working in collaboration with Venetian glassmakers, he began producing ornate mirrors and eighteenth-century style chandeliers, using black Murano glass in a radical departure from traditional Rococo colors. The exhibition will include the artist’s black mirror I Saw Othello's Visage In His Mind (2013) as well as the chandelier No Way But This (2013).