There are holiday art sales and there are funky installations – and then there’s Fulcrum Gallery, which manages to do both this month in “Das Wunder Forst.”
Shining like a multicolored candy-store beacon along the winter darkness of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the installation is a fun comment on over-the-top holiday decorating. And every bit of it is for sale – at least until 6 p.m. Christmas Eve.
The idea came from Fulcrum owner Oliver Doriss, a glassblower who works two days a week for the Seattle-based Jones, helping blow her lines of colored glass balls, tumblers and vessels.
While Doriss admires Jones as one of “very few people who actually make a living as a glassblower” by trucking her wares across the state in a van and eschewing “art” for more commercially oriented glassware, he wanted to make Fulcrum’s holiday show into something more than the usual mishmash of reasonably priced items that fill galleries this time of year.
Enter “Das Wunder Forst.” You’ll spot it from a block away: One window is filled with a golden grid of glass Christmas tree globes, the other with five giant glass snow globes. Yes, 5-foot-high glass tubes. Leftovers, Doriss says, from the Water Forest sculpture in front of the Museum of Glass.
They are filled with colored glass balls arranged in Chihuly-style seaforms, with fake snow pumping up from the bottom. Topped with Santa hats and emerging from enormous gift-wrapped boxes, the globes are hilariously tongue-in-cheek. Oh, and if you have a spare $20,000, you can buy one.
Or if your budget’s a bit smaller, look around the rest of the funny installation made to look like somebody’s living room. On an old-fashioned wooden sideboard and a matching mantelpiece (complete with fake fire) there are Jones’ stripey tumblers, and the screw-shaped ones with grooves spiraling down the side, which Jones blows into giant steel springs to get that cool shape (only $40). There are vases and the Pollock-spattered votive holders that Jones calls “color bombs.” Underneath a Christmas tree decked out in gaudy red tinsel, Mardi Gras beads and more glass balls are mock-wrapped glass bowls and vessels, just waiting for someone to claim them. Stockings, poinsettia and even a comfy armchair can be found.
This might be the first installation Tacoma has seen in a long while where elements are taken down whenever people choose to purchase them (though Doriss has plenty of spares).
But whether you buy or just look, it’ll give you a good laugh at the excesses of holiday window mania and cheer you up if you’re just driving by.
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