Introduction
- Steven A. Nash
It is unusual for a mid-career artist to have investigated along her way a wide diversity of different ideas, materials, and modes of expression, and yet, this is precisely the course of Karen LaMonte’s practice. Her career, stretching from her days at Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1980s to today, is marked by steady exploration and an underlying consistency of purpose and vision. Her thematics involve explorations of the integrity of solid form in space—the truthfulness, clarity, and articulateness of such a form—as well as the inherent qualities of her materials, the beauty of the female form, how draping of the body with textiles affects our perception of its visual and cultural meaning, and light as a sculptural property.
Having studied in the glass department at RISD, LaMonte turned to cast glass, making over the next seven years mainly small-scale figures, animals, dresses, and other objects. Coming under the influence of the great
Czech masters of large-scale glass casting (she had moved to Prague by then), she ambitiously studied the elements of their control over this difficult medium and began to produce the large transparent dresses for which she soon became well known. Radiant in their refraction of light and evocative in their hollow castings that reveal the imprint of now-vanished women, these works set the stage for much of what came later, including the recurrent investigation of the strong cultural influence of fashion on identity, self-expression, and perceptions of feminine beauty.
LaMonte’s next development involved an expansion of cultural focus and a deep dive into the history and societal meanings of the Japanese kimono tradition. With the ensuing kimono sculptures, she added bronze, iron, and ceramics to her practice. Her work in all these materials features a concerted effort to express the inherent character and textural beauty possessed by each. Soon she branched out further into a series of works involving large castings of sheets of drapery whose waves of folds inspire associations with landscape.
It was then back to European and American haute couture but with a new moodiness and a transformation of her use of light. Her Nocturnes have the same classical stateliness as the earlier glass dresses but with a much different aura, one of dreamlike shadowy settings, of longing and meditation.
With her glass, she developed a new formula that produces a dusky coloration. She started to use white bronze for its effects of gray, and the slow rusting of iron, as in her kimono sculptures, for its powdery, ineffable surfaces. Then, in a complete change of pace, some of LaMonte’s most recent sculptures are huge carvings in marble of cumulus clouds, taking her work to a new position, on the edge of abstraction.
This developmental track adds up to an impressive artistic record that is as diverse informal expression and iconography as it is with materials. Its path has been chronicled by anumber of publications as well as important museum exhibitions at, among others, Prague’s Czech Museum of Fine Art (2004); the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington (2005); the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia (2009); the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin (2017); and the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee (2018), all contributing to LaMonte’s expanding reputation. Karen LaMonte’s place in contemporary art is still being defined, but she already has made remarkable contributions. One can hardly wait to see where this adventurous artist leads us next.