Transparently Built
Artist Statements
Mildred Howard
I am challenged by the myriad possibilities of metaphor as a way of accessing cultural expression of race and gender, tensions between personal history and collective memory, and between perceptions and received knowledge. Memory is a powerful force. How is memory organized? What does memory mean in terms of real and now? Does old memory define what is? There is collective memory and individual memory. Individual memory can be quite conflicting. It is not always sentimental—there is a darker side. Semantic and episodic memory helps to recall experiences not seen. What are the physiological and psychological changes that mediate memory? How does one articulate the past and the present in a body of work?
In my work I attempt to set up dialogues that find territories of understanding between objects and context, objects and memory, and memory and experience. The start of each new work or reconfiguration of work generates in me the excitement of beginning and the anticipation of discovery. I am compelled to explore and question my thinking in order to further push the boundaries of my visual vocabulary.
I based the form of the house on a typical African-American “shotgun” house of the American South, but I also push the multivalent frames of reference. Red is an evocative color in many cultures. And such a fundamental form of shelter evokes domesticity, the sphere of women, and all the relationships that take place within a house as indicated by the stack of apples. I am intrigued by propositions about the physics of light and the reflective and refractive properties of the color red. Structure, proportion, recurrence, density, and duration are the properties of my inquiry.
The humanistic referents in Blackbird in a Red Sky, also known as Fall of the Blood House—African-American history, and the Feminine, are important to me. I contemplate how, in an ostensibly open-ended continuum of received knowledge, personal narrative and established histories can shape understanding.
—Mildred Howard
Jean Shin & Brian Ripel
Accumulating everyday cast-offs and transforming the viewer’s experience of these discarded materials are important aspects of my work. In the latest project, Glass Block (Tacoma), a collaboration with architect Brian Ripel, we’ve created an elaborate installation with hundreds of emptied wine bottles to transform the entrance of the main gallery space. The project redefines the architectural features of the gallery while exploring the transparent and colorful qualities of glass bottles. The installation reveals the underlying beauty of this familiar object when amassed, while bringing together two local traditions in Washington—glassblowing and winemaking.
Glass Block is the latest in a series of site-specific installations previously constructed at Smack Mellon Gallery in New York City (2003), Dorsky Gallery in New York City (2005), and Galerie Eric Dupont in Paris (2005). In Glass Block (Tacoma), one of the main entrances to the gallery is blocked by bottles stacked from floor to ceiling. The bottles—emptied and cleaned—were collected from neighborhood wine bars and from wine enthusiasts in Tacoma. The flat bottoms of the bottles become a dynamic stained-glass window of circular patterns transmitting various pixels of colored light into the gallery; while the protruding bottle necks with their colorful wrappings appear as an impenetrable, opaque obstruction.
—Jean Shin and Brian Ripel
Anna Skibska
I truly dislike writing about my work. I am not a writer.
But I like challenges.
This exhibition seems to be one of them. For in a short time I am putting together a three-dimensional story based on a radio program. On the top of it I have to write about it in English—challenging.
I listened to that program many years ago, as a child. But I still remember it. The story was somehow similar, by its atmosphere, to the European Gothic stories from the nineteenth centaury.
For some inexplicable reasons that program has stayed intact, preserved in my memory for so long.
Finally I have got a chance to talk about it. And I am talking or rather I am translating the narrator’s words and voice (sometimes swinging from a whisper to a loud shriek) into objects. I am translating also my emotions talking about a pathway in the moonlight with some stars and some trees. I am talking about my internal landscape.
I am sharing it with you (whoever you are and whatever your labors and aspirations are).
Hoping that you could take a rest (however short it might be) from the noisy confusion of life in the shadows of my dreams, my imagination, my memories, and my knowledge.
Thus I set everything to rights. On paper, at least. For inside of me all remains as before. I still and truly dislike writing about my work.
—Anna Skibska
Jo Yarrington
I've always been interested in liminal places, areas of the mind or reality that blur definition, that exist somewhere in between. When first reading Swann’s Way, I instantly identified with Proust’s ruminations on the space between sleeping and waking. Suspended in that glide from consciousness to unconsciousness, he seemed to find a threshold to unfettered freedom and clarity. In [Charlotte] Brontë’s Villette, when faced with the harsh realities and social restrictions of Victorian England, Lucy Snow could slip into her shadowland, an interior place of refuge and boundless possibilities. And, in Atonement, [Ian] McEwan spoke to the fertile pause between stillness and motion when he wrote “the mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between moving and nonmoving, when her intention took effect.” It is these elusive, shifting planes, these fluctuations in our psychic core and physical being, these changeable and charged arenas that I explore in my visual art.
I work with various combinations of glass, waxed paper, and transparent photographs, and these translucent materials function both as a physical framework and symbolic membrane. As these materials inherently capture and transform light, they grant renewed liveliness to an image or drawn mark, underscoring its origin as an idea or moment in time. Light never exists as a static entity. Its flickering implies that change is imminent.
Recently, I've been working on a series of sited projects in which photographs are housed in the windows and glass facades of galleries, museums, and sanctuaries. Transparent and usually quite large in scale, the images take on mythological proportions. This referencing of the archetype is heightened by the subject matter, images of the body and landscape which range from the erotic to the ethereal. Altered, layered, and ignited by sunlight, the work often seems to push outward, releasing its physicality and suggesting something just beyond its glass skin—a portal or threshold. At other times, projections of the images, caused by sunlight’s movement around the architecture, slowly change, by their color and shape, the interior space. The passing viewer is caught in this inward spill of altered light, becoming a participant in an implied ritual. This perpetual shifting of image and light alters the relationship between building and viewer. Transformation on many levels seems a possibility as the interior and exterior fold into one another, and the boundary between the two begins to dissolve.
Two years ago, I was invited to develop a piece for the Museum of Glass’s exhibition, Transparently Built. When visiting the museum for the first time, I was immediately struck by the entrance. Its size, and the shimmer and stretch of the waterway seen through the glass panels, made me think of Louis Kahn’s definition of architecture as the threshold between silence and light. I like the sense of meditative purity in his definition—light as the exterior, silence as the interior, and architecture as the transforming border though which we pass. So for my piece for the exhibition, I focused on the museum’s unique glass entrance, and chose to attach a large photographic transparency to this translucent passageway.
In developing the imagery for my piece, I thought about the horizontal shape of the entry, the museum’s identity as both cultural and educational institution, its glass residency program, its location in Tacoma, and its proximity to a volcano and an active waterway. I was inspired by the chemical, structural, and perceptual changes in glass brought about by elements such as fire, water, and light. I also explored words such as blow, diastrophism, and pyromantia, which suggest a volatile force or are about giving form or definition to a substance or belief. Pyromantia, or divination by fire or flames, led me to focus on ritual as a premise and helped structure my photographic process. Over the next few months, in a dark studio, I photographed dancers using a small light wand to literally paint with light. From those sessions I chose a warm and sensual image that captures the heat, force, and mystery of a ritual act. I titled the sited work, Lavabo, the name given to the ceremonial washing of the hands and recitation from the psalms by the celebrant before the Eucharist.
—Jo Yarrington