We’ve seen a lot of Preston Singletary lately in Tacoma. There was his big solo show last fall at the Museum of Glass, where he visited the Hot Shop. The Northwest glass artist who draws on his Tlingit heritage for inspiration has a solo show of new work at Traver Gallery on Tacoma’s waterfront. 
The attention is well-deserved. Singletary consistently is a fine worker, and the Traver show bears this out with well-made blown and sandcarved work taking up two-thirds of the space. He is showing increasing imagination and thought, and Traver’s “Contents of a Dream” takes the Native symbolism and imagery into mystical realms.
Some of this symbolism isn’t new. One of Singletary’s signature forms is a kind of soul creature, a glass-carved animal bearing either its human form or a red glass ball. In the Traver show, “Raven Woman” soars in flight, black and blood-red, carrying a naked red woman with the open, surprised look Singletary always imparts to his humans. The double-ended, multiformed expression he had captured in the earlier “Oystercatcher Rattle” – with its heron head and dog tail bearing two men clasping a double-headed snake – is echoed in “Out of the Darkness.” The black vessel is in a kind of U-shape, each side a huge curved beak with the red soul ball improbably balanced in the middle.
“Where the Soul Resides” is equally ambiguous: a log, translucently beige, opening Janus-like at either end into mouths that could be otters or wolves. Like a nurse-log, the object takes on its own life, brought into sudden light like a buried bone.
Singletary explores this lightness of color all around the gallery, which shines in contrast to the dark moodiness of the red-black work in the MoG show last year. An eagle crest juts out proudly from the wall, pale as sand; a pale silver-gray vessel “Mountain Goat” has a hint of a horn; the creamy-red “Raven Shaped Human” blends faces, wing and eyes around its surface in mystical symbolism. Of three carved glass ladles, two are honey-golden, including a superbly carved killer whale that complements in miniature the large, vertically diving black whale by the front entrance with stylized dorsal fin and smooth symmetry.
The show also contains some baskets, in which Singletary explores his animal and human motifs singly, letting the clear space between show off the woven texture of the carved glass.
Poised as they are, with the gallery’s light shining through them, the works in “Contents of a Dream” seem to take on the importance of standing stones at a sacred site – intensely spiritual, keeping their meaning close while hinting at everything they contain, transformed from curvy Native designs on glass into symbols of something deeper.
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