"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.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Arizona

Other Important Exhibitions in United States