Indeterminate Objects

media release: Arts + Literature Laboratory presents Indeterminate Objects, a group exhibition curated by Helen Lee, from Tuesday, January 9, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.

A reception for new exhibitions, including a talk by curator Helen Lee, will be held on Thursday, January 18 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

Indeterminate Objects foregrounds the work of five artist-educators who have had significant influence in their roles as lecturers and visiting artists moving through the UW Glass Lab in the past decade: Andrew Bearnot, Stine Bidstrup, Kim Harty, Dylan Palmer, and Brett Swenson. These artists heavily informed the UW Glass Lab alumni and student work featured in this past Fall’s Glass Madison exhibitions. This exhibition further sits in dialog with the Chazen Museum’s current Look What Harvey Did exhibition—a survey of the Chazen’s personal collection of classic American Studio Glass. Unlike the era of American Studio Glass (which came to a close in the early 2000s) these artists’ work resists categorization in form, discipline, and dialog. They do not fit neatly into a growing field of material-specific exploration, but rather expand material practice into conceptually-driven and divergent trajectories. 

Indeterminate Objects amplifies the sensibilities that arise from training in glassmaking processes. Vision and perception are key throughlines that precipitate from material study. Most of these works originate with a referent in the everyday—even the domestic—sphere. Yet the familiar moves through a process of keen observation spliced with fantastical imagination that calls forth the viewer’s attention in a heightened manner. These works suggest the membrane between the mundane and the magical lies in the vitreous humor of deep attention. To engage in this materially-grounded form of attention is to open up the possibility of permeability—gliding between the mundane and the magical in constant oscillation. In this way, Indeterminate Objects distort our notions of objective reality, where the power of shaping glass today is as much about the power of shapeshifting itself.