The Weekly Volcano, Jan. 2
Excuse
this old reviewer, but there’s not much of anything showing this week that I
want to review and haven’t already, but there are a lot of interesting shows
scheduled for early in the year 2014.
The new exhibition that just opened in The Gallery at Tacoma
Community College is called Global
Perspectives, and it promised to show how globalization, the Internet, and
other factors have accelerated the give-and-take between artists from different
cultures around the world. The show runs through March 21, and there will be a
panel discussion Jan. 22 from 4-5 p.m.
South Puget Sound
Community College opens the new year with their popular Annual Fine Art
Postcard Exhibit, opening Jan. 13. This year’s theme is
the old Olympia Beer slogan, “It’s
the Water.” As usual, this show promises
to be innovative and chock full of humor.
Perhaps most interesting among new
shows for the new year will be a multi-media exhibition at Museum of Glass
called Look! See? The Colors and Letters
of Jen Elek and Jeremy Bert, opening Feb. 7 and running through Sept. 21.
Elek and Bert are Seattle-area artists who have collaborated to bring this show
to MOG. The two of them spent four days after Christmas working together in the
museum Hot Shop to create works for this show, which features a variety of
glass sculptures combined with approximately 50 large, refurbished neon letters
that visitors can touch, rearrange and wear like apparel. That’s right, you can touch the art — generally
a no-no in any museum. Some of it is wearable art, and visitors are encouraged
to try it on.
“Abstract
artworks are often considered less accessible than figurative or narrative
work, but with Look! See? the artists
create a hands-on opportunity to engage with conceptual ideas,” says Curator
David Francis.
Portions
of the exhibition were previously shown at the Traver Gallery in Seattle, where
Museum of Glass director Susan Warner first saw the work. “It was such a
compelling experience that I knew it would resonate with our visitors. Museum
of Glass has never been a traditional museum and with this exhibition we
continue to engage in larger and more complex conversations about the place of
art in daily life,” says Warner.
Continuing
to step outside the traditional museum box, MOG will also bring to town Coastal Alchemy, an exhibition of
large-scale glass sculpture by Anna Skibska in collaboration with painter Meg
Holgate and poet Trenton Flock. This show treats glass sculptures as just one
of many collage elements that combine paper, photography, and even shadows on
the wall, to create an immersive, abstract environment. Painter Meg Holgate
surrounds Skibska’s collages with a series of ethereal landscapes and paintings
on glass, heightening the abstract quality of her artworks. Poet Trenton Flock
contributes “Cannon Beach”, a poem that becomes an object in itself, suspended
from the ceiling with the pages turned to the side.
It
looks like 2014 is starting off with a bang.
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