“Emanation 2019”
“Emanation 2019”
by Joyce Beckenstein | The Brooklyn Rail
July-August 2019
Glass is a seductive, scary medium: it’s hot, it breaks; it requires artists to toss their creative visions into molten infernos, and to collaborate. Independent curator Julie Courtney felt no hesitation whatsoever when she invited eight visionary artists to play with fire; to work in a medium relatively unfamiliar to them and create large-scale glass installations in collaboration with Skitch Manion, Wheaton glass Studio Manager, for Emanation 2019. His infectious enthusiasm fueled their spirited ambitions to transcend glass as decorative craft; to cajole from the medium’s mercurial transparency the movement of sound and the shape of breath; and to etch with its cutting edges new metaphors for social injustice, apocalyptical global destruction, and the fragility of human life.
Wheaton Arts’s entry reception hall, designed as a faux Victorian parlor with red-flocked wallpaper, is a funky foil for contemporary art, but Martha McDonald and Laura Baird’s installation Phantom Frequencies (all works 2019) bowed to its décor. McDonald, well-known for her site specific performances in historic venues, and Baird, a singer, songwriter and instrumentalist practicing eclectic music genres, designed a wild orchestral ensemble: squiggling glass horns soaring like celestial trumpets; little glass bottles affixed to a metal-hoop “skirt;” a clothesline of glass bells. McDonald donned the skirt for a performance. The bottles clinked. She sang atonal songs, a call and response to Baird who blew notes on clear glass horns obeying scales all their own. Channeling musical sound through crystalline, almost invisible forms, set the audience in the moment of fleeting phenomenon, a surround of echoing tonalities evaporating through space and time.