Feature image: Helen Lee, Implosive and Incendiary, 2022, Glass, matches, wire rope, 8 ft x 5 ft x 18 in. Photo: Constance Mensh.
Frank Juárez
I joined the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass Board of Directors in 2021. Their passion for the art, education, and curation of glass drew me to join this board. Having no experience or understanding of what makes glass unique, innovative, and collectible motivated me to learn about the world of glass. I have seen firsthand how artists interpret this medium through multiple processes such as blowing, kiln casting, fusing, slumping pate-de-Verre, flame-working, hot sculpting, and cold-working, to name a few. It is fascinating how collaborative this studio practice can be to create a work of art. With appreciation, I want to honor it with the work of glass artist Helen Lee as our featured Vol 38 artist.
Lee writes of her work, “As an artist, I explore language and diasporic identity through the materiality of glass. I look to this material of flux to help me explore the ways in which language is a moving target—always in motion, changing shape, form, and meaning over time, across cultures, and as mediated through technology. I dwell in these transformational moments.”
Photo: Jennifer Bastian.
“My relationship to language is shaped by my cultural background as a second-generation Chinese-American. I revisit the dual experiences that have demarcated my life—between the dead and the living, past and present, Chinese and American, Mandarin and English, sound and silence. I work with glass and design processes, mirroring the thinking that has been shaped by bilingualism. My work materializes the relationship between words and things; it makes manifest my ambition to understand loss and absence, and how we ask words to hold meaning in the same way glass holds light. I write in glass, which is to say: I write in light; I write in shadow. In doing so, my work affirms the deepest root of all languages—every word in every language begins with breath.”
“…my work affirms the deepest root of all languages—every word in every language begins with breath.”
Helen Lee is an artist, designer, and educator. Lee holds an MFA in Glass from RISD and a BSAD in Architecture from MIT. Her work is in the collections of Minnesota Museum of American Art, Corning Museum of Glass, Chrysler Museum Glass Studio, and Toyama City Institute of Glass Art. Recent exhibitions include: Exuviae at Art Lit Lab, Through a Glass Darkly at Delaware Contemporary, and Momentum | Intersection at Toledo Museum of Art. Lee has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, California College of Art, Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Ox-Bow School of Art, China Academy of Art, Toyama City Institute of Glass Art and the MIT Glass Lab. Lee is a 2024 United States Artist Fellow. She is currently an Associate Professor and Head of the Glass Lab in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and proudly serves as the Director of GEEX, the Glass Education Exchange.
About
Implosive and Incendiary meditates on the collapse and expansion of time with respect to the burden of inherited racial histories for immigrant-Americans. Large black glass drops encrusted in crushed black glass and reflective micro-beads reference two different drop forms simultaneously.
“Implosive and Incendiary” suspends the human experience of time to acknowledge the machinations by which it can seem that no time at all has elapsed since America defined a gaze upon an immigrant identity. Encapsulated pom-pom formations of matchsticks dot the installation like floating landmines with both a potential energy for ignition, and a reference to some of the oldest roots of the Chinese diaspora in America.
Alphabit is a cabinet of glass type and a digital typeface. In its physical form, all 68 glyphs found on a standard Latin-script keyboard are rendered in a 5-pixel by 5-pixel murrine typeface. The murrine process acts as a material metaphor, using a 16th century glass technology to mimic the infinitely scalable nature of today’s vector graphics. Each glyph is sorted in backlit glazed trays that conflate the layout of the QWERTY keyboard with the structure of letterpress type trays in five descending type sizes. This work collapses the material histories of typography, paying homage to the era of transition from letterpress to the vector graphic.Photography: Levi Mandel.
Smoulder composes words vs. weapons to reflect on the relationship between power and erasure, and the volatility of intergenerational trauma, with its ever-present potential energy for ignition. A set of smoke grey nested bell jars hold a tube of gun powder at the core, referencing the earliest branch of the Chinese diaspora in America. An accompanying set of whiskey bell jars hold a naked pencil, referencing the little-known history of why pencils are yellow (originally an indicator of the Chinese supply chain origin of the finest graphite)—one of many narratives of Chinese influence we unknowingly hold in our hands on a daily basis.
Obverse/Reverse – Transparency is one of glass’s most compelling characteristics—one that requires a subatomic perspective to fully understand its properties. In response to the common evocation of “invisibility” to describe Asian-American experience, this work re-images ancient Chinese cash coins in transparency to suggest a more complex perspective on the silence and invisibility associated with or more typically and problematically assigned to Asian Americans.
Traditional Chinese coins typically have four words that indicate the value, size, or region of a coin—effectively locating the coin. The words that grace this coin speak to the value and complexity of being Invisible-American. Contemporary seal script characters approximately translate to “life, death, sound, and silence,” in two homophonic pairings in Mandarin. As the work rotates, its presence periodically disappears from view as it transits on edge.
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Helen Lee is published in Vol 38. Purchase a copy here.
Frank Juárez brings over two decades of art education and arts management experience organizing local and regional art exhibitions, community art events, facilitating presentations, supporting artists through grant programs, and professional development workshops. This has placed him at the forefront of promoting Wisconsin artists, networking, and attracting regional and national artists to collaborate and exhibit in Wisconsin.