Sculpting Glass

 

 A new show at Arthur Roger Gallery features two sculptors working with glass. Gene Koss and Stephen Paul Day have little else in common with the former related to the glass movement and the latter labeled as a post or metamodernist. However, categorizing their practice limits the impact of their idiosyncratic work revealed in the display of two massive sculptures complemented by a dozen of smaller ones for Gene Koss and a number of delicate pieces for Stephen Paul Day, making for a busy visit. 

 Toil, 2019-2020, a Brobdingnagian sculpture visible from the street fills the entire front gallery. The machine born from the artist's imagination is reminiscent of heavy farm equipment, alluding to his upbringing in rural Wisconsin. Koss who started the Tulane University glass program, is known for his monumental public sculptures made of glass and steel. Looking back at his 45-year career, his practice reaches a climactic stage with this piece so huge that it requires some steps back to see it wholly. Walking around the mastodon helps connect with our inner child, overwhelmed by its dimensions, filled with awe. In the same room, shape and components (spring, fulcrum, wheel , fork) of a model, Bridge Series #2, 2010, give a cue to the artist's inspiration for its giant clone. Crystalline, pure, soothing, decorative, refreshing, ..., so many qualifiers come to mind when looking at the two-sided  sculptures displayed along the rear gallery. They feature colored particles floating in glass like nebulae in a transparent sky or swirls in frozen water. Among the blue marine, turquoise, cobalt green, pale yellow, red COVID-19, 2020, stands out, like a device ready to explode. The Ridge Road Climb series  provides an escape, a way to connect with nature from our desk or our living room. The clear rough surface of the man-made "mineral" evokes waves, precipices, glaciers, mountains, cascades, frozen lakes and more to the wandering mind. The closing piece Furrow, 2020, made of glass and steel, indestructible, stands like a final statement from the modern Vulcan.  

It takes a completely different mindset to visit the show from Stephen Paul Day Now She Sings, Now She Sobs, Now She Sings, in the adjacent gallery bathed in pink, black and white, the three colors of  twenty five or so sculptures laid on a white table or pedestals. This time the visitor is not  overwhelmed by the size of the works but by their number (all made in 2020).  Bicephalic closed compositions like Lu Lu, Les Jumelles Roses, or pieces with embedded black and white photographs and/or pipes instead of anatomic parts, all require some time to absorb their narrative. Some sculptures offer a clear message like The Chain Done Broke, others are more cryptic like Eve. The content of the miniature apothecary jars set in a display reminiscent of cabinets of curiosities relates to New Orleans's history: warped images of iconic buildings, trinkets, mementos, old photographs, objects, notes, plants, exude a whiff of nostalgia about times gone, some good, some bad. Heart of New Orleans, a frieze made with mirrors framed by the words "Now She Sings", "Now She Sobs" like a mantra, sums up a show which is not only about the city but has become an homage to the great pianist Chick Corea who just passed. 

New Orleans, the city infused in music during good times and bad times, celebrations and funerals.       

photographs by the author: 

                                      Gene Koss "Ridge Road Climb (GKOS 0424)", 2020

           Stephen Paul Day "Sirène", 2020  

                                                             Stephen Paul Day " Heart of New Orleans" (detail), 2020                              

Meta-Modernist

Last month, the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans presented a challenging exhibition. Blame It on Vegas- Collecting Meta-Modern brought me to surf the Web and find "Notes about Meta-Modernism", the Webzine initiated by the Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in May 2009. It also reminded me of my visit at the  Centre Pompidou two years ago where I saw UR from Cyprien Gaillard, winner of the Marcel Duchamp prize at the FIAC in 2010. The photographic collections of ruins from past civilizations left us wonder about the future of our world. Like Gaillard, Stephen Paul Day spends some time yearly in Berlin and though called a post-modernist, relates to the meta-modernist movement.

The artist curated the exhibition, an assortment of sculptures, paintings, objects,
randomly distributed throughout the gallery (maybe not so randomly). Napoleon and Hitler are the subject of several works, the empire builders now reduced to small sculptures. Napoleon is remembered with a lineup of eleven sugar almond candied colored busts and two busts on a pink glass base facing each other in a self-embrace. Hitler is a small lonely sculpture in a glass ball, frozen in an eternal salute. Along the wall, three large representations of matchboxes, humorous drawings included, further, The laughing Man. Blame it on Vegas, 2013, the upside down head of a laughing man with a distorted view of his smile, now a grimace, Smoker, 2013, Nursery, 2011, with their flavor of old post cards, A Theory of Everything, 2013, two life-size rabbits engaged in sex strategically placed toward the street window to attract the passers-by attention, several neo-classical sculptures with a twist like Lady Finger, 2013 which includes an anatomical representation of the thorax and abdomen of a female below a perfect face or Jacob the Doll Collector, 2013, with his cherub-like  features but a dislocated body, the list goes on. Aura, 2013, includes shackles, a zebra ankle, a plastic heart,... an accumulation of unrelated objects, like in a curios store. Romanticism is not far with Opati Ja (Sleep), 2013, the view of a railroad to nowhere bathing in a dark sunset, hopeless.
A medley of styles  (figurative, pop, neo-classical...), with a very European flavor of decadence "de bon ton", hardly provocative, the works generate little emotions.
Back to the title and Meta-Modernism, Vermeulen and van den Akker defined the movement as "an oscillation between Modernism and Post-Modernism...must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancoly, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political..."


Post-Modernism...deconstruction.
Meta-Modernism?...

At the end of my visit, I felt like the collector in the painting Portrait of a Meat-Modernist Collector, 2013, surrounded by disconnected art works, somewhat confused, looking at an elusive future.
.

photographs by the author:

Mirror, 2013
The Laughing Man. Blame it on Vegas, 2013
General Strategy, 2013
Portrait of a Meta Modernist Collector, 2013

bibliography "Learning From Las Vegas", Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Born, Steven Izenour, MIT Press, 1972