Amber Cowan. Gray 80, 2014; flame-worked glass; 64 x 28 x 4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Museum of Craft and Design. Photo: Amber Cowan.

Upon entering the Museum of Craft and Design’s current exhibition, Amber Cowan: Second-Life Glass, I was immediately struck by a sense of growth or gestation. Cowan’s complex sculptures seemed to bloom before me in a rapid, viral expansion of objects. It was as if each intricate blown, sculpted, or flameworked element had sprung from an internal living source, linked together beneath the surface by a hidden rhizome-like mass.

Cowan’s source material is heavy with past narratives of American cultural consumption and factory production. Made of American pressed glass from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s and industrial cullet (scrap glass intended for recycling) acquired at thrift shops, flea markets, or collected from cullet dumps, each of her works are repurposed.^[i] Prior to the 1960s, American glass pieces were typically produced in an industrial factory, until the invention of a portable and inexpensive furnace allowed artists to melt and blow glass in independent studios.^[ii] Produced by some of the best-known (but now closed) American glass factories, the glass and cullet Cowan uses literally and figuratively represents the remains of this industrial history. Her works can be viewed as reincarnated objects born from colors and chemical compositions of glass likely never to be produced again.

Cowan’s Grey 80 (2014) spans a little more than five feet in height by two feet in width, almost the exact same measurements as the artist’s own body.^[iii] Composed of hundreds of tiny hand-worked elements, each suggests different biological forms like ventricles, blood cells, flower stamens, pistils, and rose buds. Monochromatic in warm middle gray, the presence of the work calls to mind visions of monolithic monuments, moss on a tombstone, or fresh grass on a grave. Speaking simultaneously of mourning and preservation, Grey 80 serves as a cultural memorial to the American studio-glass movement, as well as a physical reminder of the fragile and complex human condition. Disguised by the chaos of the surrounding glass foliage are two small horse heads, nestled side by side. They read as two internal facets of one entity in psychic conversation, bringing to mind Jungian dream symbolism associated with the horse as a representation of wild intuition or repressed instinctive aspects of human nature.^[iv]

Amber Cowan. Chocolate Renewal, 2014; flame-worked recycled Fenton glass; 22 x 15 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Museum of Craft and Design. Photo: Amber Cowan.

Moist, flesh-like, and malleable, Chocolate Renewal (2014) reads as a carnal formation. It sits on the edge of a pedestal, and its back, pressed against the wall, appears to inch upward. Or it could be that it has slid down the surface of the wall and collected itself on the pedestal. Either way, the object surely possesses a type of corporeal autonomy, almost grotesque in aesthetic, separating itself from Cowan’s remaining body of work. Anxieties around the corporeal materiality of craft histories are embodied here. Chocolate Renewal recalls the active and functional nature of craft objects closely associated with bodily functions and our sometimes messy physicality.

In contrast to both Grey 80 and Chocolate Renewal, Cowan’s The Lion and the Fox (2014) seems to be less about history and humanity’s place in it, and more about the enchanting world of flora and fauna. Made from flame-worked milk glass with a matte but luminous surface, the hexagonal form references a wide-open vessel, filled to capacity with pulsating forms of natural life. The vibrancy of a moonlit jungle is implied here, as colorless trees, vines, and roots circle two seated animal figures, whose outward gaze seems to look into the future through bright red eyes. Cowan’s theme of the memorial is continued here, as The Lion and the Fox suggests a monument to the preservation of nature—an unyielding force that is both resilient and vulnerable to the will of humanity.

While Cowan’s Second-Life Glass surely comments on the trendy idea of upcycling and contemporary maker/consumer culture, the body of work is successful in its subtle subversion of concept through the artist’s skillful and seductive use of materials. Serving as a reminder of U.S. history through the metaphor of glass,^[v] a material that appears solid but is always truly moving as a liquid form, the work also generates questions concerning the transitory nature of life and the temporality of the human body. Feelings of intrigue and aversion are evoked by the work, leaving this viewer to ponder connections between human corporeality, reproduction, and the human-made material world.

Amber Cowan: Second-Life Glass is on view at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco through January 4, 2015.

Sienna Freeman is a visual artist working with photographs, found images, and the dynamics of shadow and space. Her work has exhibited across the United States and internationally in Switzerland, London, Belgium, and Canada.  Since 2010, she has been represented by San Francisco’s Modernbook Gallery. Sienna is currently pursuing a dual degree MA/MFA in Visual and Critical Studies and Fine Art at the California College of the Arts.

^[i] All technical material and process information has been obtained via the official press release for the exhibition.

^[ii] http://www.cmog.org/article/american-studio-glass-movement

^[iii] Information gathered from an in-person conversation with the artist on 10/17/2014.

^[iv] Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1964), 174.

^[v] Additional information about the history and timeline of the American Studio Glass movement can be found here: http://www.glassart.org/Studio_Glass_Movement_History.html

Currently on view at The Company in Los Angeles is Predicting the Present—a solo presentation of work by Tacoma, Washington-based Elias Hansen. Showing concurrently at The Company with a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist, Adam Janes, Hansen approaches his chosen artistic medium of glass in much the same way as Janes does his wax, due to “a shared interest in the alchemic conversions in sculpture,” as the gallery notes, meaning that “both artists engage the process of altering solids into liquids and back into solids by their respective glassblowing and candle making.” Hansen’s work is made up of various reassembled pieces of discarded furniture and other items, which he has then attached hand-blown glass circles to. These convex windows—whether attached to furniture or the gallery wall—allow the viewer to peer into a sort of proverbial rabbit hole, wherein the other side reveals an aged-looking photograph taken by Hansen of a rundown house or vehicle. With titles like Just because you’re careful with your meth lab, doesn’t mean your house won’t burn down because of bad wiring and “Blame your son,” he said, slamming the door on his way out to the truck, the pieces recall disturbing narratives from the supposed lives of each item. It’s as if these are the dialogues you might hear whispered up from a desk in passing at a flea market or yard sale, if it could speak.

Elias Hansen studied glass at the New Orleans School of Glass and Print in New Orleans, LA and printmaking and bookarts at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows, including Kodiak at Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Wood at Maccarone, New York, NY; Sack of Bones at Peres Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Suddenly: Where We Live Now at Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; Kultur der Angst at Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany; and more. He was the artist in residence at Tacoma Museum of Glass in 2007 and 2008, and his work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Seattle Weekly, Seattle P.I. and elsewhere.