Above: illuminated
Above: illuminated sculptural pendants by Jeff Zimmerman and James Mongrain at R & Company; right: a hand-blown deer sculpture by Robert Wilson at Cristina Grajales Gallery Casey McMains is one of many contemporary artists to explore the material’s paradoxes. She makes traditional cased-glass vases – using layers of different colours of glass – that go intentionally and spectacularly off the rails as she takes a knife to their surfaces. “Casey will create imperfect pieces on purpose and carve into those imperfections,” says Todd Merrill, who shows her work at his New York gallery. He describes a vase that depicts a predatory raven, a reference by McMains to the dark poetry of Edgar Allan Poe: “Things like that would not have been acceptable 25 years ago. Now, because of contemporary art – graffiti is acceptable in people’s houses these days – there is much more freedom.” Merrill, a glass collector himself, draws his clients’ attention to the spellbinding depth and mutability of the material. “What’s new is the freedom to do things that are not considered perfect,” he observes. “Because everything is smooth and perfect and digital today, it’s more interesting to the eye to be asymmetrical or offer something that isn’t supposed to be there.” Zesty Meyers from R & Company, the New York gallery that represents Zimmerman as well as glass artist Thaddeus Wolfe, who creates jagged, mineral-looking works, feels that the material’s rise is part of the larger shift towards tactility that has led ceramics and textiles to become so popular among collectors in recent years. Unlike ceramics or textiles, however, which carry more specific cultural associations, glass tends to be freer – at least in its associations. Many designers have also discovered that glassblowing can be a major undertaking. Even Zimmerman, who typically blows his own pieces, turned to Mongrain and an eight-person team at the Corning Museum of Glass studio to realise the new work. “For large pieces, you need large equipment,” Zimmerman says. “These pendants are probably 15 kilograms of weight at the end of a blowpipe, and you have to keep reheating them.” “Glass adds atmosphere, but it’s also collectable,” says gallerist Rodman Primack. “It’s no longer a hangover from the 1980s” The craftsmen at Corning also assisted theatre director and visual artist Robert Wilson in the creation of A Boy from Texas (revealed at Design Miami in December), a highly personal piece that includes blown-glass deer, some as tall as 66 centimetres, against an imagined landscape of five castglass pyramids. Some pieces took up to a month to anneal – the process of cooling – to avoid cracking. The project was both a technical and an aesthetic feat, according to Cristina Grajales, whose namesake New York gallery presented the work at Design Miami with the Paula Cooper Gallery. “In Bob Wilson’s vocabulary, he only has two lines: the straight and the curved,” Grajales explains. “So the necks had to be fairly straight – extremely difficult. And the ears had to be perfectly straight. We were almost in tears when we saw it.” For Fabien Cappello, who is a French designer based in Mexico City, no material is without its social dimension, glass included. He’s scoured his new home base in search of artisanal producers whose endangered skills he reveres, shaping oversized lamps using carnivalcoloured window glass. The owners of AGO Projects in Mexico City, Rudy Weissenberg and Rodman Primack, acquired some of the jewel-like lamps for their space as well as their own apartment. “Glass adds atmosphere, but it’s also collectable,” Primack says. “It’s no longer a hangover from the 1980s.” For Primack and a new breed of buyers, glass has finally joined the contemporary-design fold. “Like anything, good design thinking can make a thing beautiful.” DEPARTURES 53
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