Antlers, glass mark exhibit of California sculptor in College ParkPosted in Articles, Arts, Media Archive, United States on 2013-09-30 22:45Z by Steven |
Antlers, glass mark exhibit of California sculptor in College Park
Gazette.Net: Maryland Community News Online
Gaithersburg, Maryland
2013-09-12
Virginia Terhune, Staff writer
Always looking for new materials, Los Angeles sculptor Alison Saar heard that an organization she knew needed to sell a pile of antlers cast off by deer in Montana. So she bought 200 pairs.
Eager to work with glass, she spent time at the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle learning about the medium’s malleable properties and how to incorporate them into her work.
Both antlers and glass are integral to the 11 sculptures in her exhibit “Still …” coming to the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.
In the exhibit, Saar, who is biracial, explores issues of racial identity and bigotry as well as sexism, ageism and love and loss…
…In “Black Lightning” (a play on the slang term “white lightning”), Saar presents a charred stool, a mop, a bucket and a set of glass boxing gloves hanging from a pole and filled with a liquid tinged with red.
She said it’s about black men and the futures once thought suitable for them — to work as a janitor or a boxer but not to work as a president.
Hateful comments about Obama also stirred up her own feelings about being biracial in a culture where often neither black nor white groups accept you as their own.
In “50 Proof,” Saar presents a metal stand holding a basin filled with a dark liquid. Tubing runs through the basin up through a glass heart and into a clear glass head that is half filled with the dark liquid, which drips from the eyes as tears.
“It’s about the theme of the ‘tragic mulatto,’ about being between two worlds, about feeling compelled to align myself,” she said…
Read the entire article here.