The Museum of Glass presents Glimmering Gone: Ingalena Klenell and Beth Lipman on view through September 6, 2011.
American artist Beth Lipman is known for her complex clear glass assemblages comprising fruits, flowers and topiary forms; Scandinavian artist Ingalena Klenell is recognized for her kiln-formed clear glass often overlaid with lacework patterns. Klenell and Lipman have taught and lectured collaboratively in Italy, Sweden, and the United States, but this exhibition marks their first artistic collaboration.
Elements for the exhibition were created both individually in their respective studios and together during a Visiting Artist residency in the Museum’s Hot Shop in January, 2010. From this, a new body of work emerges, combining kiln-formed, blown and sculpted glass in a sequence of installations, which engage the visitor in most unusual settings.
The exhibition comprises three vignettes, Memento, Landscape, and Artifacts. In Landscape, a path meanders around sculpted clear glass components that hang from the ceiling and rise up from the floor, creating a curtain of glass. Landscape references the pioneering writings of British author Simon Schama and the paintings of Washingtonian Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943). Showcasing cutting edge technology, Landscape is unique in the world of glass.
Mementos features an assemblage of colorless, cut, polished, and fractured “objects of desire,”—some seemingly familiar, some abstracted, all unattainable in their glass encasement. In Artifacts, light projections play over a series of sandblasted fractured glass components, which are embedded into the walls. In these ways, Glimmering Gone investigates our connection with nature and collective and personal memory.
A hard-cover catalog, published in association with the University of Washington Press, accompanies the exhibition.
Image: Ingalena Klenell and Beth Lipman, The Museum of Glass
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