Josiah McElheny at AC Project Room - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Josiah McElheny is an unusual figure among younger artists, greatest in quantity obviously because he's an clever glassblower whose education consisted in part of apprenticeships with European masters. His blown-glass plates, beakers vessels and goblets are seductive, gorgeous thing perceiveds but they typically involve all sorts of conceptual twists and surprises, too. In this exhibition, it was ambiguous whether his pieces were intended as originals, as copies of historical works or, smooth more elusively, as "copies" of thing perceiveds which may never have existed. Here, five new works, sometimes accompanied by explanatory body s of dubious veracity, skittered across eras, probing our assumptions about historical artifacts.

Verzelini's Acts of Faith (glass from paintings of the life of Christ) is a dark made of wood cabinet filled with various pieces of glassware aligned in four lines The ensemble mimics what you'd find in a museum, right down to a convincing true copy which attributes everything on view to a 16th-century Italian glassblower named Giacomo Verzelini. According to the body Verzelini based these pieces upon glass objects found in Renaissance paintings dealing with the life of Christ -- glasses upon the table in different renderings of the Last evening meal for instance, or a whitestriped utensil at the feet of the crucified Jesus. The twist is that all of the glass pieces were made by dint of McElheny himself, who did indeed use like paintings as models. What arises is a reeling conflation of fact and fiction, not absent and past.

McElheny's work also has a pronounced visual power. Tribute to Female Beauty, an elegant, curvaceous goblet shaped as a female torso, picks up upon a kitschy and (as the accompanying true copy says) "lascivious" tangent in the history of glassmaking. Studies for the Search for Infinity consists of seven plates, leaning upon a shelf covered with dark fabric, that are decorated with perspectival patterns made of white glass squeezeed into transparent glass. On the opposite wall, also leaning upon a shelf, was The Search for Infinity, a solitary plate decorated with circling and spiraling patterns made of tiny air fluid vesicles loosely suggesting a star-filled celestial expanse This piece, McElheny's updating of Renaissance techniques for physically manifesting the conception of infinity, seemed downright cosmic and transcendent.

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