Light In The Wilderness | Public Display Art, Dec 2022
by Amanda Manitach
PublicDisplayArt, December 2022
IT’S THE TIME of year when darkness sinks its teeth early into the day.
Just over a ridge of mountains in the distance, one last ribbon of coral-colored sunlight dissolves into horizon. This last gasp of natural light is framed by another light so surreal it seems like something spun from software: a perfect rectangle of searing hot blue that casts its glow across the landscape, the surrounding foliage, and the sky itself.
The setting is Pilchuck Glass School, located roughly 50 miles north of Seattle. This is a school like none other, nestled in a gently wooded area dotted with rustic cabins, majestic glassworking shops, and mysterious structures that look like something transported from the Shire. Even a treehouse for grown-ups. For a few days, this magi- cal place will be transformed by neon ribbons hovering in thin air. The temporal intervention, called Light The Forest, is one way Kelsey Fernkopf attempts to reframe how a traditional medium might be used to illuminate our environment and our relationship to it.
Industrial glass blowing has been around since the first century BCE. But it wasn’t until 1962 that glass artist and educator Harvey Littleton developed the first small furnace that individual studio artists could use and glass was no longer relegated to factories. One of Littleton’s students happened to be Dale Chihuly. When Chihuly brought his precious cargo of knowledge back to the Pacific Northwest, it would change the world of glass — and Seattle — indelibly. Apart from his vast body of personal work, one of Chihuly’s lasting legacies is Pilchuck, which he founded in 1971 along with patrons Anne Gould Hauberg and John H. Hauberg. It remains one of the premier glass art education centers, attracting practitioners from around the globe.
Thanks to this colossus of innovation, more than 700 glass artists and over 100 glass studios call Washington home. We surpass the Venetian island of Murano, the Old World’s famed center of glass production since 1291, as the center of the modern glass world. Accordingly, Seattle has been dubbed the “American Venice.”
GONE HOWEVER, are the days of Chihuly domination, one might say. (Not to belittle iconic-monstrous masterpieces like his three-ton Crystal Cascade chandeliers suspended in the entry of Benaroya Hall.)
For over a decade, Etsuko Ichikawa has played with fire to make her Glass Pyrograph drawings in the hot shop. Bent over long scrolls of paper, her hands locked around the iron rod of a punty, an instrument used to gather molten glass out of the fire-breathing mouth of the glory hole, Ichikawa makes drawings by spinning the glob of molten glass along the scroll. The glass distends into a wispy tail that whips around the paper’s surface, igniting a trail of momentary fire that quickly dies, leaving blackened calligraphic whorls and flourishes in its wake. The drawings rendered in burnt cursive are breathtaking.
Her recent series Vitrified uses uranium glass as a medium for sculpture. Devastated by the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Ichikawa began studying the glass vitrification process employed by nuclear plants worldwide. To this day, trapping radioactive waste in molten glass remains one of the surest methods of neutralizing hazardous material. After studying the technology of vitrification, including research at the Hanford Site, a decommissioned nuclear complex in Eastern Washington, she began blowing and casting glass infused with low-level uranium sourced from New Zealand and Czech Republic. The resulting glass sculptures comprise a collection of marbleized, green orbs that glow when exposed to UV light, equally sinister and beautiful.
For Ichikawa, glass is personal. She imbues her pyrographs with the intimacy of ink drawings, raw and immediate, without the intervention of second chances. Vitrified shifts the tone, expanding the narrative to encompass a broader intimacy with nature and empathy for both humanity and environment. Suffering, survival, and hope tangle in the genesis of this body of work. This is glass that transcends the decorative.
Another longtime artist hailing from the Pacific Northwest, sculptor Elias Hansen approaches glass in the manner of an iconoclast, defying the sacrosanct. With a background in printmaking, Hansen eventually shifted to glass, training with mentors, absorbing techniques. Much of his work in recent years has centered around chandeliers. No doubt a nod to Chihuly, as well as a dig at the gloss of it all, Hansen’s practice evolved into one of audacious spontaneity. Sprawling light fixtures such as his 2017 You told me you wouldn't do this to me. But here I am, stuck digging through the junk on your porch, dangle with asymmetrical nonchalance. Candy-colored handblown vessels are illuminated with bulbs of all types, each luminaire daisy-chained by a mess of mismatched extension chords that loop around the steel armature from which it all hangs. It’s as though a Miró mobile and a Gordian Knot of Christmas lights had a resplendent bastard child.
Closer to the ground, Hansen’s sculptures play with glass in different heretical ways, digging into a metaphorical underbelly of the psyche with surreal assemblages that pair readymades (things like castoff junk: lighting, found glass, tubing, salvaged steel, scrap wood) with expertly handblown objects that seem scavenged from some mysterious, illicit laboratory. Shelves and surfaces are arranged with paraphernalia that resemble pipes, pipettes, flasks, and beakers enmeshed with a Dada detritus of found objects. The split from propriety and prettiness results in a tableaux riddled with unspoken stories about what lies beneath in an otherwise bucolic rural Northwest.
It’s been a minute since he told such stories. Recently Hansen relocated to manage studios at California College of the Arts, thinking to take a break from his own work. Easier said than done. He recently sent video art he’s been shooting in his own studio, which is filling up with the usual bulbs, wire, heaps of cardboard, glass. In one video, tangerine and feverish violet bulbs shimmer, trapped under an array of glass vessels. A piece of text appears at the end of the reel. It reads, “What are all these normal people doing and how do I act like one?” The tension vibrates, exquisite as it is plaintive, sardonic, compulsive.
ALTHOUGH SEATTLE remains at the razor’s edge of innovation when it comes to all things glassy, we aren’t the only ones growing more ensorcelled by the possibilities of glass. In 2019 Netflix launched its first season of Blown Away, a Canadian-produced reality competition in the spirit of Top Chef or Project Runway. The show pits international glassblowers against one another in the cauldron of the hot shop as they design everything from cups to over-the-top abstractions. Three seasons in, the series has done much to familiarize laypersons with the otherwise sequestered art form, not to mention introduce the masses to a work-safe definition of “glory hole.”
But again, there’s something special about the way artists think about glass, especially right here, right now.
Anna Mlasowsky is another of those not to be boxed in by tradition. An award-winning German artist who has studied and taught glass worldwide — including multiple stints at Pilchuck — Mlasowsky has called Seattle home for years now. When she makes glass objects, she intends them to be activated, specifically through performance and dance. To Mlasowsky, glass is extraordinary for its material and metaphorical possibilities — the ability to be hard, soft, solid, translucent, unbreakable, and fragile: ultimately, ever fluid. That resonates with Mlasowsky, who identifies as someone who exists in the interstitial space between cultures and geographies, as a pansexual, and with Borderline Personality Disorder.
During the pandemic, while other businesses were boarding up for protection, Mlasowsky pulled a 180 and opened Das Schaufenster, a gallery housed in the sizable window space of an old commercial corner store in Ballard. She overhauled the space: new ceiling, walls, and hardwood floors. Since its inception, Das Schaufenster (German for “viewing window or looking at window”) has exhibited dozens of artists and hosted socially-distanced performances and gatherings in nearby parks.
Das Fernglas (Or "faraway glass," the German word for “binoculars”) is another curatorial project more directly rooted in glass. Each month Mlasowsky commissions a glass artist to create a digital project; one's email inbox is the exhibition space. The format pushes glass-based practices into unexpected realms: poetic treatises,.GIFs, videos, stop motion, and other forms take shape, revealing thoughtful, bite-size offerings of art and perspectives from glass artists working across the world. The 2023 lineup of inbox exhibits include work by artists from South Africa, Indonesia, Turkey, Chile, Czech Republic,Ireland, and China, among other countries. Subscribe for free at www.annamlasowsky.com.
Her work continues to explore how performance with glass exists, sans crashing or smashing. This past year Mlasowsky conceived the performance On ° Venus, a story of womanhood, unfolding the burden and joy of aging, changing, evolving.
She combined two residencies to realize the components of the piece, creating glass objects during a stint at Tacoma Museum of Glass, and spending 10 weeks as an artist in residence at the Amazon studios in Bellevue.
Based on the Venus of Willendorf figurine, Mlasowsky worked with performer and choreographer Ashley Menestrina to design movement-based interaction with glass sculptures that resemble ruby-red blood cells, cowrie shells with rippling pink mouths, and conical vessels that Mlasowsky calls “fleshy openings.” As part of her artist residency at Amazon, the three-part performance was staged at the Spheres in front of an audience of employees and visitors. In the first act Menestrina activates the glass objects by toying with them, spinning the cranberry-tinted corpuscular shapes with hands and feet, nudging the cones around the floor in a dance of curiosity. For the second act, she slips into a gauzy harness lined with pockets into which she places the glass until her silhouette swells like that of the Willendorf Venus. With 44 pounds of glass strapped to her body, Menestrina’s movements slow. In the final act, she reverses the process, removing the weights, and performs solo, unencumbered. “I value glass as the only material you can both see through and look at,” Mlasowsky says.
When it comes to neon, however, there is no looking through, reflection, or refraction. But there is something about neon.
Like flame to so many moths, the noble gas flickers with come-hither warmth and welcome, argon-mercury-helium seduction. As with so many other forms of glass, what was once craft has become a fine art of its own. Neon has transcended the utilitarian signage of bars, beer, and businesses.
Fine artists like Tracey Emin, Glenn Ligon, or Bruce Nauman probably spring to mind. Or the Wonderland-like neon graveyard at the Museum of Neon in Vegas. Closer to home, have you passed over the Fremont Bridge at dusk and apprehended the Bridgetender Rapunzel outlined in neon, her long buzzing braid dangling from the northwest tower?
Back in the dusk settling over Pilchuck, there is a very different, very strange, small tower tucked in the wooded area at the end of a dirt trail. It was constructed in the ’90s by students in a glass casting class. Skirting the ordinance that no student work be permanently left behind, the class lugged their glass creations and bags of concrete into the woods and began constructing a rotunda embedded with baubles, curious windows, and tiny glass doors that open like an advent calendar to reveal an interior dazzling in its crude opulence. Thus the Trojan Horse was born, and here remains.
In the lashing chill of a November night almost 30 years later, light from a single glass tube of red-hot neon spills from the doorway and peek-a-boo windows of the structure. Like a blast burning in the belly of a glory hole.
Kelsey Fernkopf is a veteran of the neon arts, commercial and artistic. In 2018 he and Dylan Neuwirth co-founded Western Neon School of Art, a nonprofit offering classes and education in the medium. It wasn’t until the solitude of the pandemic that Fernkopf, bored and holed up in the Ballard City Lights workshop, began to play with scrap neon. Big pieces of it. At night he ran electricity from the shop and placed lit tubes in the empty streets and alleys. Vivid blues and pops of scarlet ignited the otherwise monochrome quiet of a hollowed out cityscape. Images of the sculptures gradually appeared on his Instagram, beckoning as though portals to another dimension.
Where a Flavin fluorescent sculpture alters the perception of enclosed space, Fernkopf discovered he could use neon to shift the perception of an entire landscape. And whereas LED lights may mimic traditional neon, their flat brightness pales in comparison. Neon seems alive, ions pulsing, creating luminous illusion. It bends the light. It bends space.
Each piece for Fernkopf’s Big Neon series is made of a single continuous tube, up to 30 feet in length, delicately bent at right angles or slightly curved. The results are simple, elegant lines. Eventually Fernkopf branched out from the streets, situating neon in more natural surroundings, like Blue Line, placed in Discovery Park. The cool cobalt monolith seems to rise from the center of a deserted path hemmed in by trees. Such phosphorescent ceruleans and emeralds placed in situ mirror the chroma of their natural PNW settings. Other installations feature searings reds — a touch more menacing.
Last summer Fernkopf’s Big Neon made an appearance at XO Seattle as part of Forest For The Trees. Stationed at various intervals on the roof of the Railspur building, one of the luminous bright green rectangular pieces painted a portal against the backdrop of a flickering night sky, framing high-rise buildings in the near-distance. (I witnessed one late-night reveler at the opening reception who grabbed onto the slender rod as though it were a joint on a jungle gym. He attempted a pull-up and it crumbled. Undaunted by the risk of exposure in the hostile wilds of an urban environment, Fernkopf was quick to fashion a replacement. In fact, he fashioned eight replacements.)
The spectacle of light found its next iteration in BIG NEON Playground at Gallery4Culture this winter, where Fernkopf bent his glass to create larger-than-life fantastical neon doodles: the glowing frame of a cabin wherein a fire burns, mountain peaks, and other Pacific Northwest tropes — some mysterious, some beckoning with that familiar come-hither light. Come out of the cold. The glow is warm. The (un)foreseeable future of glass has so many stories to tell, many connections to forge.