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Indepth Arts News:
"Clearly Thinking: The Sculpture of Peter Ivy and Michael Scheiner"
2002-04-12 until 2002-08-11
Phoenix Art Museum
Phoenix, AZ,
USA
Peter Ivy and Michael Scheiner are among the most recent generation of sculptors to
select glass as a tool for thinking. Both use the rich visual and symbolic potential of
glass to create enigmatic and lyrical objects. This exhibition complements Dale
Chihuly: Installations, on view concurrently in the Museum’s Steele Gallery through
June 23, 2002.
Michael Scheiner and Peter Ivy, both of Providence, Rhode Island, have chosen glass
as a medium because its versatility and metaphorical potential make it the best for
realizing their concepts. Glass suggests contradictory interpretations of fragility and
strength, brittleness and flexibility, darkness and light. Exceptional glassblowers,
Scheiner and Ivy combine it with other media that run the gamut from sheet lead and
soap bubbles to insect wings.
Scheiner pays particular attention to the
similarities between glass and the
vulnerabilities of the body and the mind,
creating forms that suggest abstract
anatomical studies and microscopic views of
cellular structure. For Phoenix Art Museum, he
will construct a sculpture of wet clay, one ton in
weight, which is supported solely by thin fins
of sheet glass.
Ivy has
described his
objects as
useless
machines.
They are fragile, complicated contraptions that suggest
the wonder of such mundane phenomena as dust
floating on the surface of water, heat rising from a light
bulb, and the pattern of cracks in a glass vase.
Clearly Thinking is organized by Phoenix Art
Museum and guest curator, Susanne K. Frantz, as
part of an ongoing program endowed by the Marshall
Fund of Arizona and designed to bring attention to
significant, but under-recognized, living American
artists. An accompanying exhibition publication will be
available in The Museum Store.
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