Light of a Distant Future brings together the work of artists Kate Abercrombie, Amber Cowan, Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez and Sibylle Peretti; whose artworks incorporate symbols, objects, and abstraction to explore their personal narratives and identities. Cowan came to the title after listening to the congressional hearings on unidentified anomalous phenomena, and was inspired by both endless possibilities of existence outside of ourselves, as well as looking deeper into the self and women’s bodily experiences. Similar to Cowan’s contemplation on the vastness of space, each artist in the exhibition build worlds in their work that are both personal and outward looking; this is accomplished by using iconography: historic, mystical and natural. All of the artists utilize references from the past to have a contemporary vision of the future. The title Light of a Distant Future also references the relationship of light in space and how it can be past, present, and future looking; this understanding of fluid time is present in the artists’ process for developing their work; often by composing identifiable images and objects that are abstracted through transformation or accumulation. Cowan, Ahmadizeh Melendes, and Peretti all work with glass which materially has a deep connection to time in how it changes state in the process of fabrication and more abstractly how glass molecules are in constant motion. Abercrombie’s gouache paintings materially are static, but similarly, Abercrombie utilizes compositional constructs, and color to build rhythms in her work. Color and light are used by all of the artists to convey their concepts in both restraint and abundance. Though the sun seems so far away, its light creates the growth of the future.
Kate Abercrombie, b. 1978, Rochester, NY; lives and works Philadelphia, PA—Abercrombie reinterprets the still life tradition creating a symbolic universe based on images and objects of personal resonance interwoven with dense patterning. Her gouache on paper board paintings look like collages if we can stretch the definition of collage into the realm of painting: layering and juxtaposing imagery with paint instead of cutting and pasting with paper and glue. The body of work presented in Some Lives is Abercrombie’s most personal yet. Many of the featured paintings show Abercrombie grappling with the issue of womanhood, and in particular, how our culture perceives women as they age—as the artist relates, she is exploring “pre-old cronedom.” But the paintings are not didactic treatises on sexist tropes regarding female aging. Rather, they are highly subjective and at times arcane ruminations on how Abercrombie co-exists with her former, present, and future selves. A parallel idea braided throughout the paintings is the notion of spiritual belief drawn from both folk and organized religion: clairvoyant power objects; objects of faith and devotion like ex-votos; references to martyred female saints; playing cards; and a range of both objects and images that have symbolic meaning in Western art’s still-life and genre traditions, which Abercrombie transforms to make her own. Painstakingly detailed images are also inspired by the artist’s encounters with the detritus of daily life in Philadelphia and metamorphose under the spell of Abercrombie’s hand—syringe caps are transformed into mandalas and hex-signs, for example. Abercrombie has an MFA from University of Texas at Austin and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. She has been included in exhibitions in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vox Populi, Fleisher/Ollman, Little Berlin, and Black Floor. She has also shown at the Creative Research Laboratory, Austin, TX. In 2005, she received an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts. In 2009, she was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Her work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum.
Amber Cowan’s sculptural glasswork is based around the use of recycled, upcycled, and second-life American pressed glass. She uses the process of flameworking, hot-sculpting and glassblowing to create large-scale sculptures that overwhelm the viewer with ornate abstraction and viral accrual. With an instinctive nature towards horror vacui, her pieces reference memory, domesticity and the loss of an industry through the re-use of common items from the aesthetic dustbin of American design. The primary material used for her work is glass cullet sourced from scrap yards supplied by now defunct pressed glass factories as well as flea-markets, antique-stores and donations of broken antiques from households across the country. Her recent diorama-style pieces tell stories of self-discovery, escapism and the power of the feminine by utilizing figurines and animals found in collected antique glass pieces. These figurines become recurring symbols in the evolving narrative and simultaneously pay homage to the history of US glassmaking. Cowan lives and works in Philadelphia where she received an MFA in Ceramics/Glass from Tyler School of Art and Architecture of Temple University. She was the recipient of the 2014 Rakow Commission from The Corning Museum of Glass and her work can be found in the permanent collection of The Museum of Art and Design in New York, The Toledo Museum of Art, and The RISD Museum. Cowan’s work is based on the rejuvenation and reuse of American pressed glass. The majority of the material is “cullet” or the scrap glass left after the production run in a glass factory. Cowan travels and searches for cullet yards throughout the country where there are barrels and piles of old dead stock colors which she then remelts scrap by scrap through the process of flameworking into the multitude of forms that create each of her sculptures. The glass that she uses is generally procured from now defunct pressed glass manufacturers. During the mid-1800’s through the mid 1900’s pressed glass manufacturing was an enormous industry that employed thousands of Americans throughout the country. Because of the popularity of designs and the ease of production by the mid-19th century most inexpensive glassware was pressed. Nowadays, this material is out of fashion and relegated to the dustbin of American design. I take this material which is abundant on the shelves of thrift stores and flea markets and rejuvenate it into a new second-life. When Cowan began working with this type of glass it started out of a financial need for inexpensive material. Cowan was in graduate school and found a barrel of old pink glass behind the furnaces of the studio. This barrel was filled with a run of broken pink easter candy dishes with rabbits and chicken lids. The color was beautiful and technically it melted very similarly to the glass she was trained to work. This almost coincidental discovery transformed into a passion for history, industry and a new love affair with the material to which she was in love. Cowan began researching the rich history of the stories and formulations of the colors I was finding. These barrels of color are often the last of their run and my work will essentially give the formulas their final resting place and visually abundant celebration of life. For the past several years Cowan unexpectedly and often receive packages filled with old glass from complete strangers. People feel sentimental about getting rid of these objects even when they are broken so they send them to me in hopes of giving them a new life. In her most recent works she has been taking an unapologetic view of her feminine perspective and have been more vulnerable to express the themes I see in my personal life. I use the collected glass objects as recurring characters to represent and symbolize themes I am working through in my daily life. These themes include an exploration of the divine feminine, and the recognition of spirituality and symbolism in the mundane. Recently, she has been highly influenced by the painters Gertrude Abercrombie and Agnes Pelton. Their use of surrealism to visualize mysticism, symbolism, grief and the dark beauty of the unknown has been inspiring to Cowan’s practice. My pieces have become a theater of acts where the characters can be followed from one scene to the next. For more information, visit www.ambercowan.com or follow on Instagram @amber.cowan
Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez, b. 1988 (she/her) combines poetry, images, glass objects and neon signage to create layered installations that draw inspiration from her Puerto Rican and Persian heritage. Melendez has been awarded residencies at Pilchuck Glass School, MASS MoCA and the Corning Museum of Glass, among others. Her work has been shown at dozens of galleries and museums in the United States and abroad, including Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, S12, Heller Gallery, Traver Gallery and the Tacoma Museum of Glass. Her sculptures are included in New Glass Review #33, #38 and #42, annual journals documenting innovative artworks in glass. Victoria is the Director of The Bead Project at UrbanGlass, a program geared towards diversifying glass and supporting femmes as they learn how to work with the material. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Tyler School of Art, from which she received her BFA. She holds an MFA in Craft/Material Studies from VCU. For more information, visit victoria-am.com or follow on Instagram @internet___angel
Sibylle Peretti b. 1964, Muelheim an der Ruhr, Germany lives and works New Orleans
In Germany Peretti grew up in an environment surrounded by traditional glassmaking. The nature of the craft was focused on skills designed towards the production of high-end decorative and functional glass objects. Trained as a glass designer at the State School for Glass Making in Zwiesel Germany, Peretti learned the techniques of enameling, engraving, cutting and designing glass. Peretti was given the skills necessary to embellish a functional object with a sense of wondrous beauty. At the same time she felt the limitation of this process. Peretti wanted to push the material further, but needed to find my personal voice in the craft and the vision. Peretti studied sculpture and painting at the Fine Arts academy of Cologne. There she discovered the freedom to translate her artistic visions in glass, which were supported and enforced by using the craftsmanship she acquired from the school of design. Although her studies at the Academy in Cologne were artistically open, she chose to continue working in glass but in a context more suitable to the philosophies of the fine arts. The fragility and translucency of the material afforded her an added dimension, an extra layer to enhance her ideas of humanities temporal existence. Glass allowed Peretti an expression deeply connected to my vision. Beneath the surface, she could produce a mysterious world, a dreamlike atmosphere where connections are tenuous and brittle. Most of her work in Germany explored that dialogue between idea and material, between creating layers of meaning and the object. Glass was that magic canvas that connected it all. In her work Peretti explores the lack of harmony between human beings, nature, and our inability of achieving a unity with the natural world. Peretti strives to uncover hidden worlds in which harmony can exist and heal. Children, who represent vulnerability are placed in a diaphanous universe of potential solutions and revived through a new and intimate, perhaps mystical reconnection to nature. While her work hovers between subjects of scientific curiosity, fairy tales and dreams, she use images of children to open her eyes to a mysterious sensibility we may have lost. Her children protagonists are immaculate in their innocence, transmitting a savage view of our own isolation. Peretti examines the child’s identity in a world of adverse layers. The overlay and containment of irreconcilable natures – of disease and beauty, of intimacy and of distance and of innocence and knowledge – have typified the search she has found most important in her work. Recently Peretti is interested in landscapes which present the inter zone between urban and rural space. She see them as territories where reality conjures illusions. As the closest landscape to us they function as a refuge and escape where wilderness enshrines, but traces of humans are evident. They are spaces of emotions, memories and solitude. The work invites us to journey into an unknown, undefined place of possibility, mystery and beauty where we find moments of clarity and introspection and may find answers about our own identity and how we experience ourselves in the world. For more information, visit www.sibylleperetti.com or follow on Instagram @sibylleperetti
VISU Contemporary is open Wednesday through Saturday from 12 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. by appointment. For more information, visit VISUgallery.com or follow @visu.gallery on instagram, email info@visugallery.com to make an appointment, or call 305.496.5180
