Images in article: Emperor's New Clothes 10" x 48" x 3"  1995, blown glass Carrousel 12" x 18" x 6"  1995, cast glass Puppet Red With Yellow Hat 14" x 10" x 10"  1995, blown glass

    Karen LaMonte, Deborah Czeresko and Tina Aufiero are artists living in New York. They are over 25 and under 40, they work with glass and they work with ideas. In the city they live in, the streets can be rough and housing and studio space expensive; on the other hand 50 art exhibitions open each month. People say New York in the place for contemporary artists to see what is promoted as the best, and make up her own mind - which of course these women always do. Karen LaMonte, at 27 the youngest, has receives a burst of recognition for her work in the past year. She participated in Heller Gallery's "Glass America" exhibition, then had a show in the gallery's "Summer Session". Her work was in curator John Perreault's "New York Biennial of Glass" and following that with Aufiero, in "Hard Water", Perreault's two-woman show. Most of LaMonte's work this year has focused on children's toys. She began with functional, delicate, clear glass marionettes based on characters from Dante's Inferno. Although they were made for a film that was never finished, they did survive to inspire LaMonte.
    
     In the work that followed she left the Inferno in favor of characters from the Commedia del' Arte. They have taken the form of free standing hand puppets, which she blows in threes. A king, devil and ass are usually grouped by the technique with which they were made. A few solo kings exist outside of the threesomes ("because the crowns are so much fun to make,") as do some figures of a blindfolded character. In all their forms, the puppets are brightly colored with loose, draped-fabric-shaped bodies that might include flourishes of murrine.
    
     One of glass's greatest virtues is its ability to capture gesture, and gesture is LaMonte's strengths. Sometimes the puppets' bodies crumple and sag, which is at first disturbing because the glass is clearly uncontrolled. But their free-form quality is actually perfect for a puppet: the lumps become part of the puppet's expression, so a protrusion is both the hip of the evoked person and a fold of the evoked cloth.
    
     For LaMonte, "technique needs to be demystified." Some of the heads on her figures were slammed hot onto bodies while they sat in the annealer; this egregious rejection of the aesthetic of glass discipline apparently shocked fellow artists at Pilchuck this summer. Yet LaMonte also has enough interest in the refined skills to go to the trouble of using murrine and cane. "People are so enthralled with technique that they lose sight of their ideas. Technique is a tool, like the color blue. You can't sit around mixing blue your whole life - the point is to put it on something. Ideas and technique are like two feet walking, one can't get ahead of the other." She likes to work in a "loose and fun" way, then add technical challenges. "It makes you focus, to try something that is a little beyond your grasp." If one were to look for discipline in LaMonte, it might be found in her blowing, but would definitely found in her research. She has been studying puppets and toys for several years, and has been reading developmental psychology on children's toy culture. She found that children's toys are often a "bridge between imagination and reality, where what's possible is tested," and that their world of toys is reflective of the adult world. Other inquiries took her to the monthly meeting of a puppeteer's society, where she expected, but did not find, a smorgasbord of creativity.
    
     As a personal interest, she has been studying at the Jung Foundation in New York, where one is taught to "practice" in coming to understand one's self. LaMonte experienced an epiphany when that concept merged with the consistent practice needed for glassblowing. Other parallels in the study of Freud's idea of a therapists "evenly suspended attention," which is engaged but not reflexive. "When I watch glassblowers, I see them working in that frame of mind," she says. While researching, she became interested in found and folk art toys, and made a version of her hand puppets from a green wine bottle. This and previous experiments with found bottles moved her to try tiny clothing made from brown and green bottle glass. The resulting garments, on a scaled-own clothesline, are full of life and grace - they succeed because of their poetic idea is perfectly matched to glass's natural gesture…