Glass artist featured at Fusion during ArtsQuest 2008

May 1, 2008 - 5:14PM

Fusion Art Glass in Seaside is featuring the work of up and coming glass artist Martie Negri in conjunction with ArtsQuest 2008.
A lifelong artist, Martie Negri began creating with paint. Though she has always been interested in glass, her recent series began about 10 years ago.
Her inspiration comes from nature and specifically flowers. Negri works from live plants interpreting their colors and structure. Her designs borrow from traditional Italian millefiori, or thousand flowers technique, yet strive for a more original style. Negri's art embraces the lovely and the fragile.

Martie Negri was selected by Bullseye Glass as a finalist in the Emerge 2006, and a finalist in The Art of the NorthEast 2007. She also has been selected by UrbanGlass as their artist to be exhibited at Sculptural Objects & Functional Art 2008 in New York.

There will be a champagne tour of the galleries along County Road 30A, including Fusion Art Glass, 4 - 8 p.m., May 8.

For more information: Cultural Arts Association, (850) 622-5970 or www.culturalartsassociation.org

The New York Times

Art Review

Really? It's All Made of Glass?

By BENJAMIN
GENOCCHIO

Published: December 30, 2007

Is that glass? gulped the young girl to the docent taking a group of schoolchildren through Shattering Glass: New Perspectives, at the Katonah Museum of Art. Yes, the docent replied, every single thing you see in this exhibition is glass.

I know how the schoolgirl felt, for many of the two dozen artworks here are of infinite beauty and wonder. Some of the displays done look like glass, and
the exhibition is so rich in stylistic diversity that it is hard to believe everything is made of the same material.

Working with glass is not easy, the material imposing all sorts of limitations on artists. Paramount, also, are safety concerns. At the same time, hot liquid glass is intrinsically malleable, able to be coiled, twisted, bent and broken into all-over-the-place shapes.

Inventiveness abounds in Shattering Glass,beginning in the foyer, where Sharon Louden has attached hundreds of buzzing, energized squiggles of colored
glass to the walls, floor and ceiling. Here the artist is literally drawing in glass. The installation is flush with a sense of joy and pleasure.

There is a fine line in glass art between pleasure and kitsch. I am thinking of those fabulously excessive decorative glass displays you sometimes find in
hotel lobbies, the kind of things designed to appeal to audiences visiting from all over the taste map. Such displays are not so much art as interior decoration.

Fortunately, there is no kitsch in this exhibition, for the curators, Neil Watson and Ellen J. Keiter, have been judicious in their selection. In fact, the accent is more on contemporary artists who happen to work from time to time with glass rather than what you might call contemporary glass artists, who tend to be associated with glassmaking as a studio-based craft.

Richard Klein, an established artist, often uses eyeglass lenses to make sculptures. Showing here is Transparency (2007), a wall-mounted construction made out of found ashtrays and hundreds of recycled eyeglass lenses. The varying shapes and magnification of each of the pieces of glass refract light, much as a stained-glass window does. The work can, however, be somewhat dizzying to look at.

Josiah McElheny is another well-known contemporary artist who works with glass. He was trained as a studio glassmaker but has forged a reputation for himself in the New York contemporary art world. On display here is his Modernity Circa 1962, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2004), consisting of eight hand-blown mirrored glass vessels inside a mirrored cabinet. The reflective environment makes it seem as if hundreds of vessels were on display.

Several other artists work with optical illusions. One is Lahaie, who makes kinetic wall sculptures consisting of a rotating motor that flutters a piece of fabric behind a mottled, vividly lighted sheet of tinted glass. The combination of motor, glass and light creates the illusion of waves ebbing and flowing like the ocean tide. This is probably not the most complex or conceptual work in the exhibition, but the visual effects are beautiful, even hypnotic.

The fragility of glass something we take for granted is never really made apparent in this show, except in Beth Lipmans Still Life With Metal Pitcher (2007), an eye-catching display of 400 hand-blown glass vessels on a dining table. There is no metal pitcher here, or not one that I could find, but it doesn't really matter because this work is all about visual delight. It is a densely packed optical extravaganza modeled after Dutch still lifes.

A willingness to experiment with placement is what distinguishes this show from other, run-of-the-mill glass exhibitions, which tend to treat the art as a precious object. There are no barriers to viewing here, with artworks mostly installed directly on the walls or floor. The curators have allowed the displays to spill out of the galleries into the public areas, where you will find, among other works, Arlene Shechets lengths of ice-blue cast crystal rope lying along the walls and floor.

Another artwork, by Bill FitzGibbons, is installed in the museums two street-front windows. It consists of computer-activated LED screens that emit a wildly fluctuating colored light show, the colors morphing and mixing together. Sometimes the light even dances between the windows, as if in conversation a playful invitation to anyone passing by.