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JOSIAH McELHENY |
Boston-born artist Josiah McElheny is a master glass-blower who infuses meticulously crafted glass vessels with conceptual ideas, creating a postmodern twist on the old issue of art versus craft. He first emerged on the New York art scene in the mid-1990s when he exhibited his glass objects as if they were artifacts from the past. Complete with museum-style explanatory labels, these works probed into the human motivation behind making and displaying objects.
Buckminster Fuller’s Proposal to Isamu Noguchi for the New Abstraction of Total Reflection is from a new body of McElheny’s work in which text plays a less central role, but the complex intellectual underpinnings remain. It was one of several pieces featured in McElheny’s solo exhibition, Theories of Reflection, a group of sculptural displays made from mirrored glass that all related to concepts of reflection. The title of this work refers to a notion utopian architect and designer Buckminster Fuller had about the abstract sculpture of Isamu Noguchi. They met in 1929, not long after Noguchi had developed his abstract sculptural style. In fact, Noguchi created a highly-polished, chrome-plated portrait of Fuller that same year. Noguchi’s new style was the result of a year (1927) he spent in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship, working part-time as a studio assistant polishing sculpture for the Rumanian artist Constantin Brancusi. In this work, McElheny has given visible form to Fuller’s notion of an "abstraction of total reflection" by creating a group of Noguchi-like sculptures on a mirrored pedestal. By mixing historical references with his masterly glass-blowing skills, McElheny deftly weds craft to concept
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects