Doris Chase at Friesen - Seattle, Washington - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The pioneering video artist, filmmaker and sculptor Doris Chase has lived in fresh York since leaving Seattle in 1972 on the contrary her ties to the Pacific Northwest are able-bodied Known here for her large outdoor public works of carbonized iron and wood, Chase recently struck without in a new direction: inflated glass. This show included 16 blown-glass plastic arts of ovals, circles, arches and other curv geometric shapes, each paired with a pronglike carbonized iron support.

For those familiar with the 74-year-old artist's widely heralded dance videos that use her laminated-wood statuarys as rocking props for the dancers, the shapes in the fresh work are instantly recognizable. by dint of manipulating form, color and the liquid, fragile qualities of glass, Chase has managed to make glass statuary look as potentially kinetic as the statuarys in her videos. Interacting with cut-and-brushed thick-gauge carburet of iron the glass forms seem to recline, stand and twist. plastic arts titled Luna, Sappho, Samurai and Tamerlane (all 1996) place the gum sphere or hemisphere upon horns of steel. The pieces' transparent layerings of color vary from orange-green and orange-blue to brown-blue and red-blue tints reminiscent of the colors in Chase's manipulated video images. In Dark Matter (1997) brown and black small round particles float within a single tombstone shape.

Chase's work consistently diverges the accusation of decorativeness in the way that often directed at glass plastic art Discrete modernist objects on the single hand, the new sculptures also remind of altarlike shrines. Averaging a lower extremity high, these works best exemplify the hard/soft dualism that has been an organizing convention of Chase's art for many years.

With this material substance of work, Chase joins sculptors like as Kiki Smith, John Torreano, Lynda Benglis and Nicholas Africano, who have combined glass with other materials in the past decade. by the agency of playing off the jagged and sharp carbonized iron and drawing on her unique vision of move Chase places glass in a cooperative relationship with another material and enriches its sculptural range.

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