EXHIBITION NEWS
Glass sculpture by Jen Violette: Fruits & Dwellings
March 7 - 29, 2008
In her first show at Daniel Kany Gallery - Fruits & Dwellings - Vermont artist Jen Violette's mixed-media landscapes and still lives incorporate hot-sculpted glass, cast glass, stainless steel and wood. Violette's dwelling series presents cast glass house forms in tree-filled landscapes: the spare settings mix a playful wit with an almost essentialist historical reverence. The reductive house forms feel distilled rather than simplified and their subtle sweetness - combined with the solidity of the trees - imparts the notion these homes have been settled for generations. Violette's dwelling sculptures ultimately present a warm and grounded relationship between the houses and the landscape - as though they have been there so long that they have become part of each other.
Violette's fruit and vegetable still life pieces are backed by a distressed steel surface that imparts an unusually effective setting for glass sculptures. Her treatment of the steel allows the artist to control richly reflected light in balance with the solidity of the metal. In Violette's Five Green Pears, for example, her hand-sculpted fruits present their vibrant surfaces with a color palette so appealing that it somewhat masks the sculptural content of the work. Violette's grouping of five humorously flows between the mathematical proliferation of minimalist sculpture and the organic growth of the fruit (Violette is, after all, an avid gardener as well as a sculptor).
Just as in the landscapes with their post-autumnal trees, Violette's fruit still life pieces are very successful in establishing a seasonal sense of time. Free of nostalgia or specific narrative, Violette's work achieves the contemplative quality of traditional still life with surprising ease and clarity.
Jen Violette received her BFA from Alfred University and has studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass and the Penland School of Crafts. She has studied with Lino Tagliapietra, William Morris, Dante Marioni, Richard Marquis, Pino Signoretto, Randy Walker and Karen Willenbrink-Johnsen among others.