jessica loughlin SHIFTING VIEWS
jessica loughlin SHIFTING VIEWS published in conjunction with the artist's exhibition SEPTEMBER 1 – OCTOBER 29, 2005
BETWEEN GRAVITY AND LIGHT The critical dialogue concerning the art of Jessica Loughlin has centered on a reading of the works as analogues of landscape, based, in part, on an oft-repeated remembrance of the artist’s concerning her formative impressions of the landscape in the central desert region of her native Australia. Another common reading is of the works as formal constructs that acknowledge the biographical facts of an architect father and a modern design background. While it is easy to find an “essence of landscape” – notably the 180-degree land/sky split that is so prevalent in Australia – in the horizontal orientation of much of her work in the last decade, it seems more productive to view the current sculptures as abstractions – pure instruments of evocation that prompt a meditative reverie. Just as Constantin Brancusi spoke of being pulled between Earth and the spirit, gravity and light, Loughlin wrestles with expressing the sense of limitlessness in the immensity of nature. She builds her austere sculptures not from what is seen in nature ultimately, but from what is known in the mind forever.
fused sheet glass that makes up each sculpture. The square-format wall pieces are divided into a series of horizontal bands of varying degrees of translucency and tone according to the artist’s design; the surface is etched or worked with a grinder to unify and shift the light-transmitting quality of the glass. The rectangular boxed forms are shallow and slightly elongated toward the horizontal. Open at the top, they are also built from sheets of fused glass strips; layered together to create banding across the primary faces, and with surfaces similarly worked to give the vessel-like forms “touch.” The translucency of the banding grades from semi-transparent to virtually opaque depending on Loughlin’s choices of color and positioning in the layering of the glass sheets, and such gradation serves to upend notions of weight and actual volume. In a manner similar to Judd’s wall progressions, the physical apportionments of volume and silhouette, as well as the contrast of solid and void, in Loughlin’s sculptures suggest the internal/external tension in architectural spaces and can trigger an emotional response.
It is apparent that Loughlin has positioned her art practice solidly within the larger formal construct of geometric abstraction and the lineage of such American artists as Donald Judd and Agnes Martin. Unlike many artists who choose glass as a medium of expression, Loughlin intellectually embraces Sol LeWitt’s oft-quoted 1967 adage “the idea becomes the machine that makes the art” and pushes her work toward a strict minimalism that belies the easy excess of glass. Working serially to create thematic variations on a single compositional format and color scheme, the artist attains a certain egolessness in the pursuit of absolute form. Like the paintings of the late Agnes Martin, whom Loughlin greatly admires, the works suggest neither identifiable objects, nor space, nor time – nothing, in fact, save a purity of simple geometry and symmetry that opens an abstract spatial ambience for the viewer. As with the sculptures of Judd, the sensuousness of material and the rigor of the systematic measuring and marking in Loughlin’s work creates a wordless, silent experience of sublimity.
In the recent works, color ranges across a subtle tonal palette from coal black to an icy blue-white. The exact color and the effect of the gauzy bands that mark each piece are determined by the artist’s choices in assembling the three layers of glass to be fused. Loughlin manipulates her restricted palette – which ranges from warm and cool whites to smoky grays and sooty blacks – to open the individual works through tint and tonality to the capturing of light and suggestion of an austere yet allusive opulence. Going from shadow into bright haze, the three-dimensional objects are grounded by the opacity of their base bands and seem to open up from darkness into the promise of the light captured inside the shallow void at their core. Whether black or white or somewhere in the gray zone, the effect seems to lead us experientially toward a serenity of the spirit that finds its source in the realm of light.
The pictorial flux of solid and void, shadow and light that animates the experience of her most recent series of kiln-formed, freestanding works and wall pieces is the result of both system and process, intention and material. In their way, these are self-generating objects that arise from the artist’s rigorous logic and systematic formulation of the
It is as repositories of light that the works’ volumetric ambitions are fully realized and their potency for meaning revealed. Light brings dimension to the forms, whether wall-hung or freestanding, lifting them free of the wall and animating the seemingly solid base of the box forms with an ascending light from within. Light both implicitly affirms and denies gravity as it expands the viewer’s awareness of the interiority of the works. Loughlin’s sculptures are liminal; they
dance intellectually at the threshold between surface and depth, solidity and gauzy shadow, the physical and the phenomenological. The light caught within the structures dissolves notions of inside and outside, in front of and behind, and yet also lies on the surface of the glass – reflected yet absorbed. Circling one of the box forms, one can become absorbed in the fused glass surface, animated as it is by refractions and reflections and its trapped air bubbles – almost alive, pulsing, shifting, and shrinking before one’s eyes. At one moment the work is all surface sheen without any apparent depth, and then with the slightest shift of light angle, sidelong illumination will sink in to open a mysterious milky, translucent space in the work – a wafer of hovering light that melts and expands the box forms beyond mere physical limits, to elicit memory and more. The perfect simplicity of form and material in these pieces belies their technical complexity and conceptual integrity. Systematic and serial, the work’s rigor argues for glass as a serious medium of post-minimalist sculpture and suggests its potential for conveying complex ideas. The peculiar transubstantiation of matter from liquid to solid, physical form to transparent luminosity invites the viewer to slow down, to open the mind to the stimulating calm of the work’s luminous core. There is within the coolly reasoned stricture of Loughlin’s pieces the moment of an abstract sublime revealed, which, in its abstraction, releases us from the routine and mundane. Emanating from within the strict form of her vocabulary is a light, an experience of light that is akin perhaps to a heavenly efflorescence – a hypnotic presence born of visual logic and without words. Light, that exalting thing which can lift us emotionally above ourselves to grasp what we cannot hold, is an engine of continuous time, changed by circumstance and ever changing. The light within Loughlin’s works centers us and opens a perpetual present tense of experiencing.
Bruce Guenther CURATOR OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART Portland Art Museum August 2005
Open Space 24, 2005, kilnformed and wheel-cut glass, 26 3/4 x 29 x 3/4 inches
BETWEEN TWO SPACES, BETWEEN WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS FELT...
Open Space 12, 2005, kilnformed and cold-worked glass, 29 1/2 x 29 x 1 inches
STARING OUT MY PLANE WINDOW, I WATCHED MARKS ON THE EARTH CREATED BY DIRT ROADS WANDERING THROUGH
Open Space 21, 2005, kilnformed and wheel-cut glass, 26 3/4 x 29 1/8 x 2 inches
FLAT SCRUBBY BUSH. THE LINES STRETCHED A LONG WAY BEFORE THEY MET. I FELT THEIR DISTANCE; I FELT MY DISTANCE
Space Between 11/05, 2005, kilnformed and wheel-cut glass, 16 3/4 x 19 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
AWAY FROM THE LAND. THE LAND SO VAST, YET NOW SO SMALL IT ONLY TOOK UP A SPACE OF ONE AEROPLANE WINDOW.
Space Between 9/05, 2005, kilnformed and cold-worked glass, 16 1/8 x 19 1/4 x 2 3/8 inches
I WAS REMOVED FROM THE LAND, AS MY MIND NOW FELT REMOVED FROM ITSELF...
Space Between 8/05, 2005, kilnformed and cold-worked glass, 16 1/8 x 19 1/4 x 2 3/8 inches
THEN THE VIEW DISAPPEARED. STILL FOCUSED ON THE ROADS BELOW, I SAW ONLY WHITE OUTSIDE
Space Between 2/05, 2005, kilnformed and cold-worked glass, 17 3/8 x 19 1/2 x 2 1/8 inches
AND THE DARK SPOTS ON THE INSIDE OF MY EYES. – jessica loughlin 2005
JESSICA LOUGHLIN Born Currently
Melbourne, Australia, 1975 Independent studio artist, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Education
Selected Exhibitions (continued)
1997 Bachelor of Arts (visual), Honors Major Glass, Canberra School of Art, Institute of the Arts, Australian National University, A.C.T. Australia Participant, Klaus Moje Kilnforming Class, Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, WA 1996 Participant, Susan Cohn Working Methods Workshop, Canberra School of Art, Canberra, Australia
2000 On the Edge: Australian Glass Brisbane City Art Gallery, Queensland, Australia Galerie Handwerk, Munich, Germany 28th International Glass Invitational Habatat Galleries, Pontiac, MI 1999 Australian Studio Glass, Galeria Nova Imagem, Lisbon, Portugal Jessica Loughlin and Giles Bettison Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland, OR 1998 Venezia Aperto Vetro, Venice, Italy International Young Artists in Glass: Australia Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland, OR Talente ‘98, Munich, Germany 1997 Resource Finance Corporation Glass Award Exhibition, Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (touring) Young Glass International, Glasmuseum, Ebeltoft, Denmark
Selected Exhibitions 2005 San Francisco International Art Fair Bullseye Connection Gallery, San Francisco, USA Meister der Moderne, Munich, Germany SIX, BMG Galleries, S.A., Australia 2004 Interiors – maps, marks and memories JamFactory, SA., Australia Jessica Loughlin (solo), Sanske Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland International Glass Exhibition, Palazzo Franchetti, Venice, Italy 2003 Jessica Loughlin (solo), Heller Gallery, NYC, NY The Glass Vessel: An International Invitational KACF, Louisville, KY 2002 Material Culture National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia Landscape : Mindspace (solo) Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland, OR Less is More / Less is a Bore Brisbane City Gallery, Brisbane, Australia 2001 Glass State, JamFactory, Adelaide, SA, Australia (touring) Cutting Edge, Axia Modern Art, Melbourne, Australia Transparent Things Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, New South Wales, Australia (touring) 2000 New Work, Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland, OR Vessels: The International Exhibition of Glass Koganezaki Glass Museum, Japan
Selected Collections Art Gallery of Western Australia Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY Glasmuseum, Ebeltoft, Denmark Glass Museum, Marina Grande, Portugal National Gallery of Australia National Glass Collection, Wagga Wagga, Australia Resource Finance Corporation, Sydney, Australia Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL Awards 2004 First Prize, Tom Malone Prize, Art Gallery of Western Australia 2001 Outstanding New Talent in Glass, UrbanGlass, New York, NY 1997 Winner, RFC Glass Prize, Australia
INTERMISSION It was easy to miss – a series of large mirrors set end-to-end, wedged into four feet of space between two adjacent multi-storied brick buildings, rising on a steep angle from ground to roof top, reflecting the walls and pulling the sky down into the void, reconfiguring it into a geometry that was at once jarringly abstract and yet so natural as to be virtually invisible to the crowds passing within feet of it in the busy courtyard.* Standing in a plaza of the University of South Australia, I watched as hundreds of pedestrians rushed by the alley or stood within meters of its mirrors, never noticing that the sky was falling. Then, rarely, occasionally, someone would pause, notice, and, as if struck by a private revelation, smile and wonder. That same sense of quiet wonder infuses the actual and suggested voids of Jessica Loughlin’s kilnformed glass panels and new box forms. Easy to miss in the cacophony of daily living, they have the power to stop us, to still the moment and to let us smile and reflect on the spaces in our lives. We are pleased to present this new body of work and especially glad that its exhibition coincides with the first Portland Art International where Loughlin’s glass inserts itself as a rich and quiet moment amidst the wealth of international art on view in Portland this season.
Lani McGregor EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR The Bullseye Connection August 2005
* “Increased Space” (pictured left), by Jessica Loughlin and studio partner Deb Jones was installed in the courtyard of the Lions Art Centre during the Glass Art Society international conference held in Adelaide, South Australia from May 7-16, 2005.
COVER Space Between 7/05 (detail), 2005 kilnformed and cold-worked glass 19 1/4 x 15 3/4 x 2 3/8 inches DESIGN Nicole Leaper PRODUCTION Jerry Sayer PHOTOGRAPHY page 3 Michael Schmitt pages 6-7, 10-11, 16-17 Bill Bachhuber pages 4-5, 8-9, 12-15, cover Grant Hancock
© 2005 Bullseye Glass Co. PUBLISHED BY Bullseye Glass Co. 3722 SE 21st Avenue, Portland, OR 97202 USA For inquiries about the artist or works shown, please contact: The Bullseye Connection Gallery 300 NW 13th Avenue, Portland, OR 97209 USA T 503-227-0222 F 503-227-0008 E gallery@bullseyeglass.com The production of works in this exhibition was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.