Ritual and Desire explores the tenuous line between historical aesthetics and contemporary attitudes through the work of three artists—Beth Lipman, Cassandra C. Jones, and Lauren Fensterstock. While each harnesses the artistry of previous ages, each artist masterfully projects those styles into our contemporary world, revealing the unbreakable ties to our past in our present. The simultaneous blurring and expansion of time and aesthetic results in work that is both familiar and foreign to the eye. It invites reflection on issues of transience and permanence, the material and immaterial, and reduction and excess. The exhibition continues WAM’s exploration of Steuben’s legacy in contemporary glass.
For this exhibition, the Wichita Art Museum commissioned me to make a large-scale collage using their historical Steuben glass collection. I named it Blind Glass after a Gertrude Stein poem and it took the form of a wallpaper installation. This image is a small swatch of the collage which repeats only once in 62 feet. Blind Glass was purchased by the Wichita Art Museum, digitally, for their permanent collection.
Ritual and Desire
Group Exhibition
Curated by Lisa Volpe, Associate Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston
Artists: Beth Lipman, Lauren Fensterstick and Cassandra C. Jones
Wichita Art Museum
1400 West Museum Boulevard
Wichita, KS 67203
Dates: May 20th - September 10th, 2017
Opening Reception: May 20th
