Glimmering glass displays in 2 new Tacoma exhibits

Fragile yet strong, fluid yet solid, functional yet ephemeral, the beauty of glass is in how it can take on a host of issues with a new voice – and that’s exactly what it’s doing at two new exhibitions at the Museum of Glass.

In “Fertile Ground,” Hot Shop artists explore glass as an expression of sarcasm, tradition or whimsy; in “Glimmering Gone,” clear glass is transformed in a breathtaking landscape both natural and human.

“Fertile Ground” asserts itself as soon as you walk in from the lobby. With Richard Craig Meitner’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” – a glass wizard broom melting in a pool of brilliant orange – the tone is loud, clever and challenging. Assembled from work made over the museum’s eight years by the 180-odd visiting resident artists in the Hot Shop, “Fertile Ground” is naturally diverse, yet the overriding vibe is of artists feeling free to experiment. Armed with the skilled gaffers and technicians of the Hot Shop team, artists (some not trained in glass) can push the boundaries of what they, and glass, normally do.

Some of the results are stunning. Former Hot Shop gaffer Alex Stisser sculpts a foot-long Airstream trailer, silvered over and complete with tiny glass wheels and tow-bar. Cute in a Space-Agey way, it laughs at retro culture. Also Space-Age is Rik Allen’s “Hypernicus,” a three-legged, distressed-silver alien with giant squid eyes and body.

Then there’s exploration of surface and texture. Doug Jeak’s “Georgia” squats malignantly, a hefty jug with comedia dell’arte face and coated with what looks like sparkly black ash. There’s an enormous vase by Dante Marioni, mesmerizing in its thin form and blue canework blurring between surfaces like light on water. Jeremy Lepisto’s tiny mounted silo-diorama evokes, with the fragility of glass, the fragility of memory and history.

Large wall photos of artists at work and video interviews link the work firmly to the fact that it was all created right here in Tacoma, and show the collaborative effort involved.

Irony is here in big doses: Daniel Clayman’s “Circular Spine” sits encased in Lucite, the ultimately useless life-ring; there are glass flip-flops and a glass bird in a glass cage. Sometimes, though, the subtlety just gets silly, like Gabe Feenan’s Kentucky Fried Chicken-inspired goblet with chicken-leg stem, or Roberley Bell’s curvy blue blob floating on a swim ring like something that’s migrated from the Kids Design gallery. There’s also an extremely irritating DVD sample-montage of Hot Shop images, with a canned percussion track that permeates the gallery.

Walk in deeper, though, and suddenly glass gets serious. A new collaborative installation by Ingalena Klenell and Beth Lipman, made just for MoG, encompasses human and natural landscapes with an astonishing grace.

The entry is a wall of seven recesses holding spotlit clear glass still-lifes. Like “Banketje,” Lipman’s giant glass banquet table in the museum lobby five years ago, these “Mementoes” are carefully, sculpturally “broken,” confronting our materialism like ironic shop windows. They also confront our sense of reality: impossibly balanced plate shards, exactly half a wine glass, an intricately twisted glass rope that connects to and from nothing.

Then the man-made windows open out into a vista of shimmering clear crystal. Sweeping some 30 by 20 feet in front of you is a towering landscape made almost entirely of flameworked glass: snowflake clouds suspended from the ceiling, crouching shrubs, thin reeds, Christmas-like trees and a river of mirror shards running to the distant, misty flat glass mountains. The sheer skill and work take your breath away – it’s like a “Nutcracker” set made out of a limestone cave. But then the landscape starts to work on you: inviting, enticing, yet coldly repelling, like something the Snow Queen would have devised to ensnare travelers. It also speaks poignantly of the fragility of our own real environment.

In contemplating this piece, Klenell was inspired by the work of 19th-century Tacoma painter Abby Williams Hill, and the romanticism and femininity shows in the careful composition and smooth lines. An absence of wall panels immerses you deeply in the work, but the museum is installing an introductory wall text, audio and interactive video/feedback kiosk in the lobby that will be helpful in understanding the influences and motivations for this vision.

Playing opposite the landscape is a man-made “Artifacts” wall: frosted glass objects (hats, cups) sculpted exactly in half and “protruding” from the wall as if they’d been thrown and lodged there. Concepts of solidity, gravity, function (half a hat?) and decoration are all challenged, the all-white serving as counterbalance to the transparency of the flamework. The two sides don’t really interact – which is, after all, the point – and after trying in vain to unite them, your brain finally gives up into pure aesthetic pleasure.

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568 rosemary.ponnekanti@thenews tribune.com

NEW MOG EXHIBITS

What: “Glimmering Gone” and “Fertile Ground: Recent Masterworks from the Visiting Artist Residency Program”

Who: Ingalena Klenell and Beth Lipman; various other artists

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. third Thursdays, noon-5 p.m. Sundays through September 2011 (“Glimmering Gone”) and October 2011 (“Fertile Ground”)

Where: Museum of Glass, 1801 Dock St., Tacoma

Admission: $12/$10/$5 ages 6-12/free for those younger than 6 and 5-8 p.m. third Thursdays

Information: 866-468-7386, www.museumofglass.org