HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

The Glass Show brings together 25 contemporary artists working in glass.  All of the artists in the exhibition use glass as a part of a larger palette of materials, and each have their own stylistic or conceptual motivation for their use of the medium. As curator, my interest in putting together this show was not merely to highlight a traditional craft form, but to focus on an industrial material loaded with symbolic and alchemical properties— which suddenly seems to have been embraced by a range of emerging and established artists.  A few years ago, exhibitions of artists working in ceramics were appearing everywhere, and as I surveyed the scene recently, I saw glass having it’s analogous moment in the spotlight.  From gallery exhibits to art fairs; from DIY artist-run stained glass workshops in Brooklyn; from the experiences of several of these artists from residency programs at Urban Glass and Bullseye; and perhaps from the simple act of artists trading knowledge with one another—artworks made of glass are on the rise. The Glass Show is a celebration of a moment of confluence, and it barely scratches the surface.

– David Kennedy Cutler

Tauba Auerbach works across myriad mediums to destabilize hierarchies between design, art and perceptual experience, undermining what the artist calls the “habituated gaze.”  Auerbach’s inclusion in the show, Spontaneous Lace, appears as if it were made from both industrial and natural processes.

Layo Bright’s sculptures and wall reliefs are often made with blown, fused and kiln-formed glass.  Her works reference geopolitical concerns, mass migration, and personal ancestry, using icons and templates of traditional craft and mass production, including Nigerian Ife bronze heads, west African textiles and Ghana Must Go bags.

A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist, whose *disturbed mirrors, two of which are included in The Glass Show, are made from everyday objects partially or fully incinerated by hand-ladled glass.  These dysfunctional mirrors do not reflect, but are clouded with burn-outs, orifices and traces of dematerialized objects, trapping within the glass a cross-section of an interior cosmos.

Jonny Campolo is a prolific musician and glass-based artist, whose works can be improvisational, interdisciplinary, and collaborative.  Known as a leading advocate for a revival of glass-made artwork, Campolo has hosted stained glass and glass-art workshops, and collaborated on various glass and electrical lighting-based projects with Jeffrey Tranchell (also in this exhibition).  Campolo’s irreverent use of figuration, decorative arts, and functional home decor create a fictional world of abundant characters and narratives.

Graham Collins uses various material approaches and substrates (ceramic, cut and quilted paintings, above ground pools) to broadly reflect on the traps, tributaries and conventions of painting as a primary vehicle for western art history.  Ever-challenging the ease of viewing an artwork, Collins’ utilizes obfuscation and the viewer’s body movement as tool to experience his work.  This exhibition includes one of his iconic tinted-glass works, comprised of commercial window tint on framed glass which partially shields a monocratic canvas within.

Anneke Eussen uses found objects, often cast-off car windows or antique glass, in combination with industrially fabricated materials like metal and stone, to craft hauntingly beautiful wall assemblages.  Eussen’s appropriation of Minimalist art strategies is enhanced by her skill at rendering solids ethereal and boundless.

Marley Freeman’s generous approach to painting allows her canvases to become vessels for material exploration, gestural improvisation and clashes of colors.  Freeman’s production can allow for a host of influences, collaborations with other artists, and framing devices that become part of the artwork itself.  Freeman has formative memories of her father’s textile archive, and for this recent series of glass works, she has imported her hard-won painting techniques into a more traditionally craft-based medium of glass.

Martha Friedman is an artist whose subject is the human body and it’s history of sculptural representations, medical interventions and preservations.  Utilizing meta-narratives of sculpture-making, lab-work, choreography, and inter-connectivity, Friedman presents body parts and body-like extrusions as empathic sculptures that are beautifully cerebral, horrifying and humorous.  Index 1 (2020) succinctly captures her ingenuity of contrasting materials that are hard and semi-hard, transparent and semi-opaque.

Joanne Greenbaum’s pioneering paintings, drawings, ceramics and glass works hover between shape and line, structure and disarray, style and anti-style. Her works in glass are particularly adept at literalizing the many layers and stylistic overlaps that can be found in her paintings and drawings.

Frankie Haines is many things.  Publisher, performer, artist, writer, candle-maker, musician:  a portal-jumping provocateur who considers all his activities part of the flow of an artistically-lived life.  For each of his polyonymous appearances at various art and performance venues, he alludes to hidden currents in this world and other speculative realms.  His stained glass works are an excellent distillation of his interests and talents, as they are both tangibly comprehensive and perceptually elusive.

Elias Hansen’s blown glass is often combined with additional fabricated elements, readymades and electrical lighting.  His distinctive fusion of hand-made glass with industrially-made wiring and hanging devices, combined with a spectrum of colored lightbulbs, are presented through installations that have extra-dimensional associative relationships with science, subculture, outsider art, and home decor.

Jongho Lee’s assemblages of found and fabricated objects are the result of his contemplative studio time, spent exploring what is inherent to a material and what it lacks.  His interventions are reminiscent of the industrial prerogative of “interlocking parts” although Lee’s interconnections are materially poetic, and surreally adjacent.  In The Glass Shelf (2023), Lee constructs a kiosk of found fencing and plexiglas to display blown and found glass elements.

Suzanne McClelland’s paintings interchange written language and gestural painting, ramping up tensions between information delivery systems (directional signals, texts, maps, and information technology) and the viscous qualities of paint and mark-making materials.  Her work in glass includes fragile, nearly impossible-seeming ladled-glass works that mimic the free-form of handwriting.

Steve Miller makes work at the intersection of art and science, with inventive contrasts between methods and materials.  His works are concerned with technology and its effect on the health of the ecological world, as well as expanding perceptual and epistemological possibilities of digital culture, reflected through art.

Sam Moyer makes works of various primary materials (fabric, stone, glass, metal) with consideration towards how disparate elements contrast and are perceived.  Moyer’s ability to destabilize material weight, texture and color, combined with her knack for maintaining structure through fractured compositions, creates thrillingly palpable work.  Her fused glass works contain the methodology of her large-scale wall works, but allow for a transparent layering that is unique to glass.

Heidi Norton uses ecological subjects in combination with light, pigments and the transparent qualities inherent in glass and resins to conjure scientific, preservationist and alternative medicinal tendencies within naturalism.  Norton was raised by new-age homesteaders in rural West Virginia in the 1970s, and has grafted those formative experiences onto a contemporary armature.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s innovative work in glass continues her progressive push for photography as a studio medium to rival painting and sculpture.  Using the metaphor of early photography’s reliance on vulnerable glass-plate negatives, Rafferty continues mining her vast repertoire of sight gags, where objects and images carry the weight of societal impositions, from public performance to private desire, gender ideology to consumerism, from body politics to office politics.

Ugo Rondinone works across many mediums, cannibalizing pop and primitive forms to produce work that is generous, succinct and poetic. With subtle intervention, Rondinone’s gestures turn common iconography into wondrous objects.  His work in glass include cast glass horses that appear as if they were extracted from bodies of water, while his stained glass clocks convert a practical tool into a sublime vista.

Lara Saget combines and transforms primary materials in inventive ways that tune awareness to the qualities found in glass, stone, wood, pigments, plants, as well as the histories of human engagement with those materials and the natural world. Recent works have included inventive merging of bronze and stone and glass, and her contribution to this exhibition are two cast glass parts of Joshua Trees.

Meret Seger is an artist working in various mediums, but often the act of drawing converts found objects into formal artworks through a qualitative synchronistic processes.  Employing The Principle of Indeterminate Proximity, Seger discovers geometric frequencies through the process of making.  Tearing up The Plan is comprised of three drawings on glass, which are studies for a painting.  Each glass panel is made-up of approximately seven steps which are described on seven preparatory sheets, each panel utilizing the y-axis of the proceeding drawing as it’s x-axis, with the preparatory sheets serving as the final drawing of each panel of glass.

Beverly Semmes uses stereotypes of femininity and gender representation as a subject across many mediums. Originally shown as part of a larger presentation at the 57th Carnegie International,  Grey Veil, Melons, and Red White and Blue (all 2017), use oil paint and pornography magazines on glass to conflate women’s bodies and vessels.  The glass as substrate allows the viscous qualities of the oil paint to activate and personify the evocative containers.

Louise Sheldon is a painter, working primarily in watercolor, whose visionary confections range from flower arrangements, bodega displays, grocery store mailers, vending machines, album covers, textile patterns, and more.  Sheldon’s riotous celebrations include her glass pieces, which she calls “remote controls”: hand-holdable glass talismans containing a puffy couch’s worth of gummy bears, gummy worms and birthday candles.

Justin Sterling’s work engages with the milieu of the city, and the social and economic pressures of urban living. His stained glass works evince his tendency toward “semiotic disobedience”, repurposing tossed windows as containers that freeze the anarchic act of breakage, investing them with implications of negligence and protest, while re-fashioning the glass with color and action as something sacred and sacrilegious, sublime and transcendent.

R. Blair Sullivan uses a research-based, multidisciplinary approach to mark-making.  Working across sound, performance, photography and sculpture, Sullivan merges ephemeral phenomena like light and smoke with sculptural framing devices, which often take the form reminiscent of the body.  For The Glass Show, Sullivan has fashioned a lamp of broken laptop screens fused together using stained glass techniques.

Jeffrey Tranchell, after a stint as a more conventional exhibiting artist in New York, has turned toward a sprawling engagement with trade-work and decorative arts. Since relocating and investing his time rehabilitating houses and abandoned land in Detroit, Tranchell’s projects have become an unpretentious Gesamtkunstwerk, where urban agriculture, a sculpture park, DIY neighborhood festivals, curatorial and community projects, a gallery in his living room, and the hand-made mosaics, woodwork, furniture, lighting and stained glass in his home are all part of his larger visionary methodology. Tranchell has exhibited his Suncatchers without permission throughout constructions sites in New York City, replacing the code-required plexiglas windows with custom stained glass affixed with one-way screws.  He makes custom stained glass for anyone’s home, and for gallery exhibitions he exhibits his stained-glass “calling cards,” decorative designs that include his phone number, so that anyone who sees it can commission their own.