  |
||||||
Perreault, John. " Karen LaMonte, Reflections on Glass ." American Craft . June/July ‘05, Cover and pp. 42-45. Piece featured on cover: |
||||||
Just in time for the tail end of her exhibition at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts this past winter, I visited Karen LaMonte in Prague , where she now lives and works. It all started with a 1998 Fulbright to investigate Czech glass casting, but there were other reasons for relocation. Work and living space in Prague is cheaper than in Brooklyn , New York , where she had settled after graduating from the glass program at the Rhode Island School of Design. For a native New Yorker, the Czech Republic is hardly difficult to negotiate; the trams are efficient, art is important and membership in the European Union is a done deal.
Snowflakes fatling on icy cobblestones, the Disney-esque Prague castle looming, we made our way to a 16th-century beer hall to sample the famous spongy, hockey-puck Czech dumplings. Navigating through the hodgepodge of architecture that tourists (and architecture professors) find so charming, we came upon the welt-lit window of the Czech Museum of Fine Arts. Suddenly I saw LaMonte's Remnant (Suit), a glass bas-relief looking like a flattened man's suit of ice, or like the remains of the Golem, but made of water rather than of clay. Lit from behind, it glowed like a beacon. Peeking through the window would not satisfy a tourist's curiosity; one had to enter, as I did the following day, and descend into the Romanesque vaults of the basement of this old, old building. There, in a finely calibrated theatrical display, in her first solo museum exhibition and her first exhibition in Prague, were LaMonte's most recent glass dresses and her cast mirrors, collectively displayed under the title Vanitas” (December 15, 2004-February 19, 2005). I had seen her earlier glass dresses in New York , at Heller Gallery. Exploiting all the contradictions of glass to explore ideas about gender, identity and the female body, LaMonte gives these contradictions new depth. Is glass too glamorous? Can glass look soft as well as hard? Can representation deal with powerful abstractions? In Prague her signature freestanding dresses ranged from the child's outfit called Sailor's Dress, 2002, through Fluted Dress, Graceful and the spectacular Dress Impression with Drapery, all 2004. Except for Sailor's Dress, they subtly but clearly present the impressions of womanly bodies beneath the glass clothes—a complexity both poetic and didactic, lifting LaMonte's achievement above most contemporary glass art. These are sculptures of the first rank. They can hold their own against any representational sculpture now being produced, and in the glass world, they raise the bar. The cast-glass mirrors represent a new body of work. The Standing Oval Mirrors, like vanity-table look ing glasses, the wall-mounted Larks and the prone hand mirrors called Sleeping Mirrors all reveal ghost ly faces, male and female. The photographic faces have been inscribed on the verso of the glass by sand- blasting through a photosensitive resist. First you see them, then you don't. Your reflection is someone else. Although the freestanding dress sculptures certainly can embody both vanity and death as suggested by the exhibition title—undue self-regard, fashion, the body and, yes, beauty itself are all transitory—the mirrors cinch the theme. The dark display turns them into the accoutrements of a séance dedicated to the human comedy. How did this art come about? I have followed LaMonte's progress for a number of years. I watched her develop when she worked in various capacities during the 1 990s at the UrbanGlass art center in Brooklyn , where I was executive director. She was excellent at glassblowing, a technique that at the time seemed well- suited to her boundless energy. But casting, a method that is less immediate and requires great persistence and patience, became her forte. Casting puts one in a very different space. Time slows down. We knew some thing was up when we found a dead bird in the unused freezer compartment of the lunchroom fridge. LaMonte moved from blown-glass marionettes to cast-glass rocking horses, to a mold-blown child's dress. Suddenly she had found her subject. Her art became clothing. Casting made it possible to create large-scale sculptures, but not entirely without difficulty. It took her an entire year to perfect the first glass dress sculpture she made in the Czech Republic . Although LaMonte was initially situated in the historic Old Town, the cramped quarters and a flood of the Vltava River (perhaps more familiar as Smetana's Moldau) inspired a move to the cliff-high Letná neighborhood on the river's right bank. She found a building that not only offered living quarters complete with Art Deco woodwork, but also a back-alley garage that, joined to the first-floor storefront, provides work space and a private gallery. When I visited the studio, two helpers were at work on the rubber positive for a reclining figure; she was adding draped fabric to another. The two-part mold process is complex. Basically LaMonte, using models, takes George Segal's plaster casts one step further. There are two layers: the body and the dress. The double molds are shipped north and cast in a glass foundry owned and run by the artist Zdenek Lhotsky . Although LaMonte proudly displays a pipe rack of thrift-shop dresses, she is working more and more with drapery. She disdains artist sound bites, but does volunteer that her new use of drapery is an attempt to give body, as it were, to things that defy description, like emotions, spirituality' and the transcendent part of human beings, . . .to frame the transcendent part.” For a glimpse of the final process, the next day we motor through Prague 's suburbs, which are probably not unlike Warsaw 's or Moscow 's, for obvious reasons. After the Velvet Revolution, in 1989, Communism left behind a residue of practical but ugly architecture ringing the theme-park center city. Once we reach the open countryside, we are in an even deeper time warp expressed by flat fields in the mist and hedgerows on the horizon. And then it becomes hilly and forested. Closer upon Pelechov, with its historic glass factories, rustic chalets have become the summer homes of Praguers or perhaps of Germans, since the area is so close to the border. lam given a tour of the atelier, thrilled to be on the sacred ground of Stanistav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova. This is where, in a factory then owned by Brychtová's father, the couple produced their now world-famous glass oeuvre. Forbidden other outlets during the Soviet period, artists who might have preferred painting and more traditional sculpture shifted to studying design and working in the glass factories. That the primary product was abstract sculpture made of glass allowed serious art to be made under the noses of the commissars, or so the story goes. LaMonte is the first American artist to work at the Lhotsky glassworks. She is there for practical and economic rather than sentimental reasons. Lhotsky's facility has the world's largest glass kilns dedicated to art-making. Glass casting in the United States , because it is so time-, labor- and energy-intensive, is enormously expensive. It is not that the cost of the glass batch is necessarily prohibitive, but that the annealing process alone may take weeks of energy consumption. In the Czech Republic , large-scale casting is presently more affordable than anywhere else. The American sculptor Howard Ben Tré now casts some of his work there and others are scheduled to follow. Although her sculptures are produced at what was once the red-hot center of abstract glass, LaMonte's art is figurative. Expressions of the political, sociological or even the personal in glass have too often proved elusive. This is not the case with LaMonte's formally and metaphorically complex sculptures. Clothing is social insofar as it socializes the body. Clothes are armor, Clothes are mirrors. “Mirrors are,” in the artist's words, “how the invisible is manifested in the physical.” In her large-scale freestanding sculptures, it is usually the female body that LaMonte examines under and through glass, through the translucent folds and drapery of dress. Her headless women might be wearing wet clothes, for that is how their bodies can be seen. Glass appears to cling to glass. At first one may notice only the eerie dresses, but then the glass unveils the shape of a hip, a breast. This is how one can be fully clothed, yet nude. Resistance to glass persists. It is too shiny, too hard. The material itself is too beautiful, although one could also say that about marble or even wood, Usually not noticed is that glass, unlike more acceptable sculpture materials, can be entered visually, can be looked into, Glass thus offers a fourth dimension— that of the inside. Since all sculpture is a metaphor for the body, this is disconcerting, since it may suggest the Visible Man and the Visible Woman once used to teach rudimentary anatomy. Visual penetration is not only voyeuristic, and therefore taboo, but can be equated with the sexual as well as the medical. Glass has a covert sexual content. Karen LaMonte's dresses unveil this repressed meaning.. The Museum of Glass : Center for Contemporary Art, Tacoma , Washington , is organizing ‘Absence Adorned,” an exhibition of LaMonte's work, with a catalog, lobe shown December 10,2005-September 4,2006. John Perreault is a critic and curator living in New York City . He writes regularly for artsjournal. com/Artopia.
|
