John Kiley: 10,000MPH

JOHN

KILEY TRAVER GALLERY / AUGUST 2016

10,000

MPH

FRACTOGRAPH #1, May 13, 2016 16:01:34:00 Solid Borosilicate Crown Glass, 20.5 x 13.5 x 3”

FRACTOGRAPH #2, May 13, 2016 16:38:33:22 Solid Borosilicate Crown Glass, 13.5 x 20.5 x 3”

We’ve all done it. A glass slips out of our hand, and ends up in pieces on the floor. A baseball goes awry and we hear the unmistakable sound of glass shattering. The boxes that hold their replacements are labeled “Fragile,” but the proper term is brittle, which aptly describes glasses’ poor resistance to crack growth. Unforgiving.

Glass need not be fragile. John Kiley could have stood on his unbroken blocks without worry. We can look out onto a bustling downtown Chicago from the Willis Tower in a glass box 103 stories above the street without fear. We can stomp up and down architecturally trendy glass stairs with abandon. In these examples, the weights of our bodies are spread over large areas – our feet, sized 5 to 15! Yet the concentrated forces from Kiley‘s swinging sledgehammer are sufficient to initiate and propagate cracks.

In the laboratory, we would test the strength of glass in a more controlled manner. We would support glass beams over long lengths and bend them. A single crack generally grows, leaving only two fragments. Impact resistance also can be measured by dropping a steel ball onto glass plates from a specified height. Neither of these tests have quite the results of Kiley’s artistry, though they can all be explained using the same science.

If we look carefully at the fracture surface of the glass, regardless of how it is broken, we find many clues as to how the cracks grow.

Those experienced in fractography, the study of fracture surfaces, would search for the origin of failure. For Kiley’s Fractographs this is obviously where the sledgehammer hits the glass surface. At the area of contact, we would expect to see a smooth mirror-like region in the glass, likely to be less than a millimeter in thickness, but easily seen using a microscope. A narrow roughened region, called the mist, follows as the moving crack is perturbed out of its flat plane. As the crack continues to grow, it picks up speed and branches further, moving along various pathways. The branched cracks form steps on the surface, known as hackle, the lines of which point back toward the failure origin. If the mist is magnified, it will appear to have the same structure as hackle. This self-similarity implies that the source of the perturbations is the same at each length scale. The ultimate crack speed is limited by how quickly sound travels through glass; in the borosilicate glass, this velocity is thousands of miles per hour.

But why are these pathways that provide such appeal in Kiley’s objects so convoluted? In many everyday materials, such as the porcelain of our coffee cups or the stainless steel of the spoon we use to cool our beverages, the atoms, the building blocks of the structures, are arranged in periodic arrays. We call these crystalline materials; the spacing between atoms and the planes of which they are arranged, are exact – the “fingerprint” of the material that helps us differentiate porcelain from stainless steel. These periodic arrays provide preferred planes and direction to propagating cracks. In non-crystalline solids, such as glass, however, the atomic structure lacks order beyond nearest neighbor atoms. Consequently, there is no preferred direction for cracks to travel, and the elastic disturbances from the sledgehammer cause the cracks to propagate in many directions. It is no surprise that when the sledgehammer is swung differently each time to meet the disordered glass structure, a unique Fractograph is created. The result is beauty.

Katherine T. Faber, Ph.D. Simon Ramo Professor of Materials Science California Institute of Technology July 2016

Chasing Light

By John Drury

In his new exhibition, 10,000 MPH, eight formidable blocks of optical polished glass, stunning in their clarity and mass, replace the color and form for which John Kiley is so widely known. Gone are the meticulously blown orbs. Gone too, are the enticing color combinations of color; the airy, seemingly buoyant, hollow forms now replaced by solid and earthbound blocks of polished glass. Kiley, with the abandonment necessary for truly inspired change, now explores the material pared down to its pure and unique essence.

It is rare that a successful artist will so drastically change course mid-stream. However, it is often precisely at that time that the most important and timely advances are made. With his new body of work, John Kiley has done just that. In startling contrast to the laboriously executed work we have come to expect from John and with an abrupt and seemingly total reversal in his approach to the medium, he leaves his studied technique and glassblower’s bench behind.

A certain lucid abandon is necessary when intentionally breaking glass. With a single swing of a 10-pound sledge, hardened steel meets crystal plane to spill luminescence at 10,000 mph, the speed at which cracks propagate through glass. And just as instantly, the energy of that moment is captured to generate an indelible record of action and impact, destruction becoming being.

These are not simply creations of impulse. Rather, they are monuments of thoughtful concentration, revelry and determination. At this point in the evolution of studio glass, glassmakers have resolved most of the technical issues once proving hurdles to the fabrication of ideas. In search of new possibilities, the brave switch gears, unearthing new methods supporting the conceptual foundations of their work and study.

Broken glass is not new to the visual arts. Most famously, Marcel Duchamp embraced the shattered material in his Large Glass, a sculpture broken by accident and repaired to incorporate cracked panes. In 1973 and on his naked belly, artist Chris Burden wormed his way through fifty feet of the broken material on the streets of Los Angeles. An equally spare statement, it is perhaps contemporary artist Yoko Ono’s, A Hole - a sheet of plate glass pierced by a single bullet - that best compliments Kiley’s single blow to the material. John admits a guilty pleasure in his feral action. In a moment of manic intemperance, his is a leap of faith; a game of chance with endless and fertile possibilities.

The eight monolithic sculptures included in this new exhibition mark an important and significant moment in John Kiley’s career. While these newest works are based on the same notion that has guided all of his work in sculpture - that there is beauty revealed in the broken - this body of work does away with nearly all extraneous elements, pushing us to see clearly the break itself as beautiful. Hairline fractures disperse to loosely capture and define the space of the crystalline form. Kiley, in explosive and studied action, captures a totally unpredictable yet strikingly captivating network of facets, fissures and shards. It this shattering of transparency he beckons light itself in, inviting it to play. In infinite and stunningly beautiful iterations, John Kiley gives a gift of captured light.

FRACTOGRAPH #3, May 13, 2016 17:01:53:102 Solid Borosilicate Crown Glass, 20.5 x 13.5 x 3”

FRACTOGRAPH #4, MAY 23,2016 16:04:46:48 Solid Borosilicate Crown Glass, 20.5 X 13.5 X 3”

FRACTOGRAPH #5, May 23, 2016 16 :10:25:33 Solid Borosilicate Crown Glass, 20.5 X 13.5 X 3”

FRACTOGRAPH #6, June 20, 2016 11:13:44:31 Solid Borosilicate Crown Glass, 20.5 X 13.5 X 3”

FRACTOGRAPH #7, June 20, 2016 11:51:31:81 Solid Borosilicate Crown Glass, 13.5 X 20.5 X 3”

FRACTOGRAPH #8, Jue 20, 2016 12:05:03:86 Solid Borosilicate Crown Glass, 13.5 X 20.5 X 3”

“FIVE MINUTES LATER I’M SHAKING A BIT” - JOHN KILEY

JOHN KILEY 10,000 MPH AUGUST 3 - 28, 2016 TRAVER GALLERY ARTWORK PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFF CURTIS PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY BY RUSSEL JOHNSON

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