When asked if he identifies more as an artist or a designer, Thaddeus Wolfe seems genuinely stumped. But perhaps it’s that way for anyone working with glass, a material that’s notoriously hard to confine: “I don’t think I’m a great designer,” he muses. “Maybe it’s because I’m not a master of glass yet that I never quite get what I intend. But sometimes cool things happen from mistakes.” It’s a pretty self-deprecating summation of process coming from someone whose chaotic, mysteriously opaque Assemblage vases are the subject of a solo exhibition opening tomorrow at Chicago’s Volume Gallery, which has in the year and a half since it opened become somewhat of a barometer for the Next Big Thing.
Chalk Wolfe’s humble outlook up to a healthy Midwestern upbringing: He grew up in Ohio, the son of an architect, always building small figures in clay. “I did art on my own in high school,” he says, and in some ways he’s been working in a similar fashion since moving to New York nearly a decade ago. While paying the bills with fabrication jobs — terrariums for landscape designer Paula Hayes, or cast-glass pieces for architect Michele Oka Doner — he was constantly making his own work on the side, and it’s only recently begun to see the light of day.
The Assemblage pieces began during a residency at the Creative Glass Center of America in New Jersey, but after seven failed attempts he set them aside. “I made the forms way too crazy,” Wolfe says, resulting in holes or material inconsistencies. When he returned to them almost three years ago in his Brooklyn studio, he began perfecting what’s become a relatively crude, improvisational process. At its heart is a one-shot plaster-silica mold, which means that no matter the planning, each piece remains fundamentally different from the one that came before. Such mixed results can be frustrating — “sometimes the shape is too strange for a glass bubble to fill, and I’ll have to throw it away,” Wolfe says regretfully — but they can also be freeing for Wolfe as a maker, saving him the drudgery of creating the same thing over and over and allowing him a measure of delight each time he breaks open a mold to find the whole thing has worked. The fact that each piece is different and beautiful in its own right is also part of what makes his work so appealing to the outside viewer — and what made it almost impossible to choose the images featured in this slideshow.
Event that inspired you to be a maker: “I’ve made things my whole life, and it provided some solace at times. When I was about five, I wanted to be a potter, which is pretty much what I turned out to be.”
Style movement you most identify with: “Lo-fi. I’m more analog than digital. I practice simple, non-computer-assisted processes.”
If you weren’t a designer, what would you be? “A painter or a ceramicist.”
Thing you love most about New York: “It can be exciting just to bicycle or walk around aimlessly and discover new things. The city is inexhaustible.”
Thing you hate most about it: “Stupidly long lines for everything — lines for shows, lines for bathrooms, obnoxiously long waits on a Tuesday night for restaurants in the middle of nowhere.”
Favorite place to shop for materials: “I usually just go to the local Ace hardware in my neighborhood, on Knickerbocker Avenue. An old-school Italian family runs it. The place is a dump, but they have everything I need — even art supplies.”
When he was an art student in the '80s — in Kassel first, and then Berlin — Markus Linnenbrink worked primarily with grays and blacks. “I had no idea what to do with color,” he admits. “And honestly, I was a little afraid of it.” Which is ironic, considering that for more than a decade, the German-born, Brooklyn-based artist has built a body of work that centers around thick streaks of color — painted in stripes on gallery walls, poured in puddles on the floors of art-fair booths and installations, and dripped in lines down the face of his canvases. “Somehow a field trip to Italy where we spent three weeks painting outside got me into the idea of color, but I had a long period where I would mix, like, red and green. I feel like I had to walk through a lot of dirt and mud to get to the brightness.”
On the photography blog Feature Shoot: An interview with artist John D'Agostino, who uses smashed stained-glass Tiffany windows from the 1930s as photographic negatives. D'Agostino's grandfather rescued the shards from the East River when Tiffany's studio was being torn down; the grime crusted on them from being stored away for 75 years now forms a crucial part of his imagery. "The layers of detritus on the surface of the glass have decomposed into wonderful biomorphic forms [that] combine with the layers of color underneath," he says. "This creates a dialogue between past and present."
It's funny to hear Esther Stocker talk about reading between the lines. The Vienna-based painter is known for manipulating spatial geometry using the framework of the grid — both on canvas and in her trippy 3-D installations — until the mind starts making linear connections that aren't really there, trying to find order in the optically illusive chaos. But that's not what Stocker's referring to. She's talking about Charles Schultz's Peanuts.