Mining Glass
June 16, 2007 – February 3, 2008
Organized by the Museum of Glass
Sponsored by The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Russell Investment Group, Click! Network, and the National Endowment for the Arts

Tacoma, Wash. (March 14, 2007)— In celebration of its Fifth Anniversary, the Museum of Glass will present Mining Glass, a new exhibition that explores how the medium of glass has gained prominence in 21st century contemporary art. Opening June 16, the exhibition will include nine large installations that will be displayed in two of the Museum’s three gallery spaces.

Mining Glass brings together eight internationally distinguished and influential contemporary artists who come from diverse cultural backgrounds and disciplines. These artists are: Wim Delvoye (Belgium), Teresita Fernández (United States), Mona Hatoum (Great Britain), Maya Lin (United States), Jean-Michel Othoniel (France), Kiki Smith (United States), Fred Wilson (United States), and the late Chen Zhen (China). While the artists of the Studio Glass movement have brought glass as a medium to the forefront of contemporary art, the artists selected for this exhibition have minimal relationship to that movement and tend to use glass differently in their work. Many have been mining glass for years for its exceptional flexibility of form and its propensity for eliciting emotional response.

“The duality of glass—precious, magical and mystical, yet common, practical and functional—makes it an attractive material for contemporary artists,” states curator Juli Cho Bailer. “The prominent use of glass in this exhibition invites the viewer to consider how the material has expanded beyond its traditional application in decorative and functional art.”

Up until the late twentieth century, glass objects were widely considered to be decorative rather than fine art. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of artistic movements, including the Studio Glass movement, began to challenge the stigma that Modern Art had placed on anything resembling ornamentation, functionality or craft. The 1980s Postmodernism era promoted multiculturalism and hybridized practices and paved the way for the diverse approach to creating art used by many of today’s artists. Work in glass, like that in other materials, has now joined the broader mainstream of art where the actual fabrication of art objects may be undertaken by others, albeit under strict supervision of the artist. The works that comprise Mining Glass are first and foremost conceptually developed.

Mining Glass is organized around eight narrative themes with each artist’s work addressing a different subject matter and utilizing glass in a unique way. The exhibition features two new installations, created by artists Maya Lin and Jean-Michel Othoniel, with elements made especially for the exhibition during their Museum of Glass Visiting Artist residencies. Othoniel worked at the Museum in October, 2006, while Lin’s residency will take place March 16 – 17, 2007. Fred Wilson will also visit the Hot Shop for a residency August 8 – 12, 2007, as part of the Museum’s annual 12-week Visiting Artist Summer Series.

“As we approach our Fifth Anniversary, the Museum’s board of trustees and staff have reconfirmed our commitment to glass and clarified our mission,” states Museum director Timothy Close. “Mining Glass exemplifies this focus.”

Mining Glass is organized by Museum of Glass adjunct curator Juli Cho Bailer who also curated Karen LaMonte: Absence Adorned, William Morris: Myth, Object and the Animal—A Mid-Career Survey, and most recently, Fresh! Contemporary Takes on Nature and Allegory for the Museum.

EXHIBITION NARRATIVES:

EXCESS
Wim Delvoye (Belgian, born 1965)
Much of Wim Delvoye’s work both challenges the value of high art and subverts accepted notions of decorum and social conventions about sex and nudity. In doing so, he questions contemporary society’s relationship to consumerism and the culture of excess.

In Mining Glass, Delvoye’s body of work will be represented by five stained glass windows from his 2001-2002 Muses series that integrate Cibachromes, x-rays, sonograms and MRIs to capture the artist and various models engaged in carnal acts.

ARTIFICE
Teresita Fernández (American, born 1968)
Teresita Fernández’s work incorporates a variety of synthetic materials into reconstructions of natural phenomena. Her work invites the viewer to investigate the relationship between the organic and the artificial.

Fernández’s contribution to Mining Glass is Eruption (Large), created in 2005, a curvilinear sculpture covered with innumerable, shimmering glass beads. The piece gives the illusion of hovering just about the ground.

BOUNDARIES
Mona Hatoum (British, born 1952)
Palestinian by birth, Mona Hatoum was in London in the 1970s when war broke out in Lebanon preventing her from returning to her family. Her work explores issues of the home and homeland, security, unrest and boundaries—often with political undertones. Her subject matter often alludes to the body and daily life contrasted with her preoccupation with imprisonment.

Hatoum will be represented in Mining Glass by her Web (2006), an immense network of stainless steel wires and lead crystal spheres. It is beautiful and alluring as well as hostile and menacing.

LANDSCAPE
Maya Lin (American, born 1959)
In her career, Maya Lin has created a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale installations and architecture as well as intimate studio works. She looks at the landscape through a 21st century lens, often using technology to re-imagine and rethink perceptions of the earth and our relationship to it. A committed environmentalist, her work often asks the viewer to take a closer look at the natural world.

For Mining Glass, Lin will create a new installation of hot-sculpted clear glass “water drop” forms that she will create in the Museum’s Hot Shop during her Visiting Artist residency March 16 – 17, 2007.

DESIRE
Jean-Michel Othoniel (French, born 1964)
Jean-Michel Othoniel is one of the most renowned French artists working in glass today—he designs the work which is then fabricated together with master glassmakers. Othoniel’s works suggest eroticism and sensuality and are drawn from his fondness for gardens, dreams and a heightened sense of the body.

Two of Othoniel’s works are included in Mining Glass. Black Heart, Red Tears (2006-2007), is a new installation that combines thousands of small black beads crafted in Italy and France with larger hand blown glass elements produced by the Museum’s Hot Shop Team during his October, 2006 Visiting Artist residency. Mon Lit (2003), a dramatic four-poster bed of blown glass and felted quilt, is reminiscent of fairy tales.

ENCHANTMENT
Kiki Smith (American, born 1954)
Kiki Smith’s art displays a propensity for handmade and diverse materials. Developed over the course of three decades, her work explores the body, plant and animal life, and most recently, art history and literature, particularly myths, legends and fairy tales.

Smith will be represented in the exhibition with her installation, Frogs (1997/2007). Comprised of 35 cast glass frogs, the work expresses the artist’s strong sense of play and ability to reveal the enchantment that can be found in everyday life.

IDENTITY
Fred Wilson (American, born 1954)
Since the 1980s, Fred Wilson has created original art installations that examine the way museums and other institutions have shaped social conventions and biases, particularly race. He rearranges found objects and objects from pop culture and museum exhibitions and creates a different context. Recently, Wilson has begun having objects fabricated in black opaque glass that speak to the question of identity and the notion of blackness.

Wilson will be represented by his 2005 installation, Dark Dawn, comprised of liquid and gooey looking forms suggestive of tar, oil, ink, or tears.

INTERSECTIONS
Chen Zhen (Chinese, 1955-2000)
Chen Zhen’s work offers a visual synthesis of the diverse cultures he encountered throughout his life. Faced with a long illness, Zhen used the human body, illness and medicine as metaphors for relationships between the material and spiritual worlds as well as Eastern and Western cultures. Although often large in scale, his art retained a sense of his intimate feelings about his experiences and ideologies.

Zhen’s Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body (2000) is included in Mining Glass. One of his last works before his untimely death, the piece explores Zhen’s deep meditation on the body and how different cultures approach understanding and healing.