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Past and Future:
Lucie Boucher & Bernie Huebner
By working as a team, Waterville artists Lucie Boucher and Bernie Huebner have been able to expand their technical boundaries and develop wholly innovative structures and content. The works they call glasscapes are assemblages of shaped glass elements set in beautifully-crafted wooden stands that are backlit by fixtures built into the bases. While the sets of glass elements are specifically balanced and composed by the artists, they imbue their works with a unique sense of dynamism by not constraining the placement of the flat elements. If the viewer is inclined to shift a piece or two (or all of them), there’s nothing to stop it from happening.
Heubner and Boucher’s Euclid, for example, is a piece that features sixteen yellow, green and blue geometric forms in flat glass. The triangles, squares, circles and hexagons overlap to create varying rhythms and degrees of color saturation. The shallow layers of the vertical elements create a type of optical depth one might expect in painting, but Euclid delivers a sculptural theatricality to go with the frontal and over-archingly flat presentation. Through backlighting, the work clearly announces itself as glass and it lets the viewer see it is about light just as much as about color. Shifting between flatness and three-dimensional logic, Heubner and Boucher show in their works that while glass is sculptural, it is not like other media.
The content of Alex Gabriel Bernstein's cast glass sculptural work relies on the subtlety of his personal sensibilities. It is his feel for color and sculptural form that sets his work apart (and usually well ahead) of that of his contemporaries. It is his ability to combine the richness of color in dialogue with dynamic textures that allows Bernstein to articulate strong sculptural forms that deliver elegance and subtlety with the force of clarity. His Green Wing presents an unusually complex sculptural form that holds itself together by an intense color tonality and the continuity of organic logic. Bernstein uses the immateriality of light to further the upward motion in the form. The effect is a cast glass sculpture that appears alive and almost taking flight.
Until recently, Bernstein was the head of the glass department at the Worcester Center for Crafts in Massachusetts. He has also held faculty positions at the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass and the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina where he currently resides.
For more information and publication-quality images, please contact Daniel Kany.
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