“‘Phantom Frequencies’ at Wheaton Art Center, Martha McDonald and Laura Baird’s Victorian Parlor Piece”
“‘Phantom Frequencies’ at Wheaton Art Center, Martha McDonald and Laura Baird’s Victorian Parlor Piece”
by Matt Singer | Artblog
July 1, 2019
“Phantom Frequencies,” a visual-art installation and mini-opera by performance-artist Martha McDonald and composer and musician Laura Baird, activates the vast and boldly decorated entrance lobby of Wheaton Art Center’s Museum of American Glass in Millville, NJ. The piece, with blown glass plates and bell-jars dangling from ropes attached to armatures, sits atop the lobby’s plush red carpeting and serves as a gateway to Emanation 2019, the Center’s third biennial exhibition, up through December, 2019.
The artists invited to exhibit by independent curator Julie Courtney—Jesse Krimes, Tristin Lowe, Karyn Olivier, Richard Torchia, Allan Wexler, Jo Yarrington, along with McDonald and Baird—drew inspiration for their site-specific works from Wheaton’s permanent collection of thousands of works in glass made over centuries, and made use of the Center’s remarkable resources: a working glassmaking studio and its master glassmakers.
The museum’s lobby packs a visual wallop. Seventy feet wide, 40 feet deep, and 15 feet high, it’s 42,000 cubic-feet of flocked wallpaper dizzyingly patterned in deepest gold and claret, red wall-to-wall carpeting with a swirling texture, chandeliers with octopus arms from which countless crystal beads dangle…and much, much more. The lobby is meant to evoke a Victorian parlor circa 1888—the year Wheaton Industries, which grew into an international maker of glassware, was founded—but its aesthetic speaks strongly of the late 1960s and ‘70s, when the faux-Victorian Wheaton Village was conceived and built.