My family flew in from all over the country to spend the week of Thanksgiving together as we have done my whole life. We took a trip to the Toledo Museum of Art. I had attended this museum years prior, but the memories were blurry and with my years at CCS, I now had a much greater understanding of many art forms.
We began at the glass exhibition. As I walked through the galleries I found myself enthralled in trying to decode how each piece was crafted. I read the descriptions of every piece and examined their forms and textures. I knew nothing about glass sculpture but I was determined to figure it out. One piece that particularly fascinated me and the piece I have chosen to focus on in this essay was Dress Impression With Train by Karen LaMonte.
The piece presents itself as a glass dress. It stands alone in a closed-off room. The surrounding space encourages the viewer to orbit around and fully consume its presence. The dress is hollow but looking through its translucent glass drapery reveals a haunting impression of a woman in the nude. LaMonte’s process consisted of casting a nude model into a reverse mold which she then dressed in a nightgown drenched in hairspray to preserve its form. She then cast the fabric in glass. The initial reverse mold left an impression of the model that had once laid nude on Lamonte's studio floor.
The absence of a figure created mass. The invisible defined the visible. And the line between what was there vs what was implied blurred. I found myself relating this to the invisible in other art forms. There is a palimpsest in every piece of art. What is seen vs how it came to be both exist simultaneously even when the process itself is invisible. Process holds no form. It contains no mass and yet it still leaves an impression on every piece, sometimes even completely changing how a piece is seen.
There are few greater examples of process defining a piece than in printmaking. Rather than being labeled by materials used to create the piece, prints are defined by the process in which they were made. Before I was taught the process behind lithograph print I would have had no idea the amount of work and preparation behind each print. A simple pen drawing will be perceived completely differently than an identical image printed in intaglio. Printmaking has taught me the importance of process. Each and every step must be completed with care. The image appears on its matrix in seconds but creating the plate took weeks. Every piece of art holds a universe of questions and infinite knowledge. As I walked through the museum the distinction between process and product became less and less tangible.
Comments