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Auction Heat

 

It may only be February but we’re busy planning for the 2015 Penland Benefit Auction–our 30th–to be held August 7 and 8th at Penland. Tickets can be purchased online here.

 

This year, glass artist and Penland trustee Tim Tate will be leading a collecting group from the Alliance for Contemporary Glass to the Benefit Auction–and glass will be centerstage with works commissioned by glass artists Susan Taylor Glasgow and one-of-a-kind table centerpieces by Sally Prasch. For previews of these works and many more in the coming months, please sign up for our auction e-newsletters here or join our auction event page on Facebook here.

 

Tate

Tim Tate, Maybe She Dreams of Rivers, cast glass, video, 18 x 24 inches. Featured work of the 2015 Penland Benefit Auction. Retail value: $12,000.00

 

For those of you who may not receive our auction e-newsletters, we wanted to share this month’s edition featuring Tim Tate’s glass and video work Maybe She Dreams of Rivers, seen above.  Glenn Adamson, director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, writes about Tate and this particular work in the essay below. (We’ve also included the video component of the work following the essay.)

 
 

Tim Tate by Glenn Adamson

“Last year, I attended my first Penland auction. Of the many great pleasures involved in the event, none was greater than meeting Tim Tate. A figure of Falstaffian charisma, Tate lit up the tent with his humor and heart. I was glad to discover that his work lives up to the man. He is that rare artist who combines true generosity of spirit with a razor-sharp intellectual acuity. By putting glass together with video, one of the art world’s most apparently traditional media with its most apparently progressive, he shows that such oppositions are in fact groundless. Any medium has the potential to support new ideas – and Tim Tate has plenty of new ideas to go around.

 

In the case of Maybe She Dreams of Rivers, he offers an interpretation of a classic artistic theme, Shakespeare’s Ophelia. One thinks immediately of John Everett Millais’ Pre-Raphaelite treatment of the subject, a fragile maiden floating face-up in the weeds, her hands spread in a gesture of eternal prayer. Tate’s version is less sentimental, yet I find it even more haunting. Ophelia floats slowly from side to side, doubled as if caught in the slippery slide from life into death.

 

Interestingly, Tate has imagined the doomed heroine dreaming of her own fate–captured permanently in a virtual state. As he notes, our relationship to technology is just as destabilizing today as it was in Victorian times, when the skies filled with industrial smoke and trains first churned their way across the landscape. Our encounters with technology are more private, often occurring within the small dimensions of a touch screen. Yet they are no less unsettling, conveying us across time and space in a constant frictionless glide. In Ophelia, he has found an ideal personification of this state of perpetual drift. Shimmering in her ornate surroundings, viewed as if through a glass darkly, she holds a mirror up twenty-first-century life, lived all too often at one remove.”

 
 

Dreaming Of Ophelia from Tim Tate on Vimeo.

 
 
 

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Photo(s) of the Week: Dots and Lines

The studio of Penland School resident Micah Evans

This is what the studio of Penland resident artist Micah Evans looked like last week. Normally Micah works by himself, but he was hosting a collaborative work week with Japanese flameworkers Akihisa Izume (left) and Takao Miyake (center). This involved two torches brought from Japan and a lot of red and green hoses for propane and oxygen. Micah’s studio motto is “hustle!” and, despite the room being almost quiet (except for Phish playing at a low volume), it was clear that there was calm but intense hustle — and some high-level work — going on.

 

Akihisa Izumi at Penland School of Crafts

Akihisa and Takao were both working with a technique that involves making patterns on the top of a domed piece of glass tube and then transforming the top of the dome into a disk that encases the pattern between two layers of clear glass. Akihisa was using thin glass cane to make patterns of white lines.

 

Takao Miyake at Penland School of Crafts

Takao was creating designs by applying thousands of tiny, colored glass dots. Here he’s working on a piece that Akihisa had already partially covered with a twill-like pattern of diagonal lines.

 

Takao Miyake at Penland School of Crafts

This is the last step of the process, in which the patterned dome is shrunk, flattened, and encased in clear glass. Although I watched Takao do this, I have no idea how he made this happen.

 

Work by Takao Miyake and Micah Evans

The finished disks are generally made into into jewelry or large marbles. But this week, Micah was incorporating them into his existing glass designs. Here’s one of Takao’s disks that’s now part of a glass yo-yo. (This was all done freehand.)

 

Work by Akihisi Izumi and Micah Evans

This yo-yo was made around one of Akihisa’s pieces.

 

Work by Akihisi Izumi and Takao Miyake and Micah Evans

This is the collaborative disk that Takao is working on in the pictures above.

 

Micah Evans

As if that wasn’t enough, they made this off-the-hook  three-way collaboration — a large bottle that houses a chameleon skeleton sculpted by Akihisa and has a stopper topped with one of Takao’s disks. (This picture was swiped from Takao’s Instagram feed.)

 

Thanks to Micah, Takao, and Akihisa for letting me invade their quiet hustle and take these pictures (after I got my jaw off of my chest).  -Robin Dreyer

 

Micah Evans on Instagram: @micahglass
Takao Miyake on Instagram: @takaomiyake
Akihisa Izumi on Instagram: @a_k_i_o

 

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2015 Penland Resident Artists

We are happy to announce that four artists have been selected to join Penland’s resident artist program. Dean Allison, Maggie Finlayson, Tom Jaszczak, and Seth Gould will join Andrew Hayes, Mercedes Jelinek, and Jaydan Moore in mid-September, 2015, to begin their three-year residencies.

 

Dean Allison

Dean Allison’s cast glass portraits exploit the nature of his chosen material and process to capture the finest details of the human form as he explores the subtleties of the human condition. Dean has worked at Penland for the past six years as our glass studio coordinator. In this time he has established himself as a respected emerging artist in the national glass community. He has exhibited his work widely with esteemed galleries such as Habatat Gallery and Riley Gallery. He was represented by Riley at 2014 SOFA Chicago and was named a “2013 Rising Star” by the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass. Dean has been a visiting artist and workshop instructor at The Glass Furnace (Istanbul) and Pittsburgh Glass Center, and will be an instructor at Penland this spring and a demonstrator at this year’s Glass Art Society conference in San Jose, CA. Dean is ready to take the leap to become a full-time studio artist. During the residency he plans to build and acquire necessary studio equipment while devoting time and research to develop the type of glass most suited to his technical and aesthetic ideals. He looks forward to working with glass artists in the extended Penland community like Richard Ritter and Mark Peiser to develop his research and learn from their combined expertise. Meanwhile, he will continue to make new work and seek and strengthen professional opportunities and relationships that will support his career. Dean holds a BS in Studio Arts from Illinois State University and an MFA from Australian National University. deanallison.net

 

Maggie Finlayson and Tom Jaszczak

The work of collaborators Maggie Finlayson and Tom Jaszczak spans the full spectrum of contemporary ceramics. Maggie’s recent work explores ceramics, mostly porcelain and earthenware, in combination with a host of other materials (fabric, wood, bone, horse hair), merged and deftly handled to create rich, intimate installations that explore domestic objects and spaces, ritual and memory. Tom combines traditional and digital techniques to create thoughtfully designed functional pottery with rich, subtle surfaces that inspire and speak of daily use. The pair will come to Penland from Montana where they have, most recently, been resident artists at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena. While continuing to make their own individual work, Maggie and Tom look forward to exploring a line of collaborative functional work—combining their technical and creative strengths and sensitivities. They see this residency as the chance to combine resources for a future career that will support them both as artists/makers. Between the two of them, Maggie and Tom have exhibited work and taught at art centers and universities all over the US and Canada. They have also received several awards and grants to support their creative endeavors. Tom earned a BA in Visual Art and a BS in Biology from Bemidji State University (MN); Maggie earned a BA in Religion/Philosophy from Concordia University (Montreal) and an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Minnesota. tomjaszczak.com

 

Seth Gould

Seth Gould is a contemporary metalsmith and toolmaker dedicated to the study and stewardship of traditional metalwork techniques. His work is strongly influenced by historic design and technique from both Western and Eastern craft traditions. Seth draws inspiration from the classically forged forms and highly ornamented designs of European ironwork from the 17th-19th centuries. He forges, files, chases, and carves utilitarian objects in steel—ranging from hammers to cookware—following in the intricate footsteps of this tradition. Once the work is formed, he moves to a jeweler’s bench to develop detail and ornamentation through inlay and engraving of nonferrous metals; these techniques borrow heavily from Japanese traditional metalwork. During his residency he hope to continue his education and mastery through complex projects of his own design. The skills and techniques Seth uses in his work were once more widespread, but there are fewer and fewer metalsmiths practicing them. He hopes to pass on this knowledge through his work and studio practice. Seth shows his work nationally and has been an instructor/demonstrator/presenter at the 2014 Society of North American Goldsmiths Conference, Peters Valley School of Craft (NJ), Smith Shop (Detroit), SIMS Conference at Southern Illinois University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a Penland instructor and will return this fall to co-teach a toolmaking concentration in the iron studio with renowned smith Peter Ross. Seth has a BFA in Metalsmithing from Maine College of Art and was a Penland Core fellow from 2011-2013. sethgould.com