Shattering Glass

Sunday after I finished with stuff at the church, we drove up to the Katonah Museum of Art to see their “Shattering Glass: New Perspectives” exhibit. Normally looking at pieces of glass doesn’t have much of an allure to me, but I’d been told by a friend that I’d find this exhibit to be different and she was right. The exhibit has 22 different artists each coming at the idea of glass from very different approaches. Some of the artists--

such as Karen LaMonte in her Dress Impressions with Drapery--used glass to capture ancient art forms in a different medium than we’d traditionally find used.

Italian artist Angelo Filomeno also combined his ongoing fascination with death and skeletons, most often done in works of embroidery, with glass in his Cold (which reminded me very much of the skeleton paintings often done on ancient church walls to remind people of their mortality).

But most of the works try to push the envelope in the way people experience the medium of glass.

Josiah McElheny, for example, plays with blown glass and two way mirrors in its attempt to capture what being a contemporary person—ever reflective, ever inward-focused-- is like. And my two favorite works in the show were a piece of glass sculpture by Mark Zirpel in which Zirpel creatively used eyeglass lens and old ash trays to have us see in a new way and Bill FitzGibbons jellyfish, made out of a combination of blown glass and neon lights.

Photo Reality

I spent Sunday evening up in the Catskills at an “arts party”, a two-part event that began with physical theater and dance performances and then, after a short break, had a Q & A with photographers whose “Interactive Landscape” show opened that night (and will be in the gallery until October 14^th).

The most interesting part of the evening for me was the Q & A discussion with four of the photographers whose pieces are part of the gallery show that opened that evening. (You can see several of the photos from the show here.) Several audience members wanted to discuss the difference between what a photographer who was clearly exhibiting work as fine arts rather than as photojournalism owed/didn’t owe viewers in terms of realism. People said that they had different responses to Mathew Porter’s strong piece “Crash” after Porter explained how he had created the piece in his gallery by combining a previous nature photograph with a miniature car hung from a string. And there was a clear response to the fact that in both Amy Stein’s works displayed, the animals in the photos turned out to have been stuffed rather than alive. The discussion moved in the direction of a “Wag the Dog” type situation and raised the issue of whether we expect (and/or have the right to expect) something different in terms of a photograph’s presenting things “as they are” than we do in a painting. The more I thought about it, the more I realized photos (unless they are obviously changed to be surreal) feel “closer to reality” than a painting does. And that remains the case even though I can rationally ask what, in a postmodern world, does reality even mean in such a context?