If it’s possible for something to be beautiful and creepy at the same time, Paul Stankard has created it and embedded it in a tiny world of solid clear glass.
In his paperweights and cubes now on show at Traver Gallery, the New Jersey glass artist manages both to fashion exquisitely lifelike flowers, leaves and insects, and to imbue them with an eye-widening scariness as they engulf both the tiny people inside the globe and the viewer’s descending eye.
At first glance, the Traver show doesn’t appear to be significantly different from the Stankard exhibit on display in the Museum of Glass – the artist speaks with a single, clear voice, making orb after orb of these delicate botanicals. But at Traver, there’s a kind of retrospective if you look closely, which gives a clue as to how the artist progressed from simply beautiful to slightly disturbing.
The first orbs are from the early 1970s – you have to go around behind the desk to see them – and they’re small, flattish, with just a single flower inside: the classic two-dimensional paperweight, though with Stankard’s usual exacting skill. The simplicity is beautiful, but it doesn’t speak beyond that.
By the 1990s, (there are none from the ’80s), the orbs get more spherical, bigger, their flowers more complex and three-dimensional and embedded with seed pods, moss, even berries and a damselfly caught in midflight, all worked in gorgeous colored glass. Spread beneath some of the bouquets are grains of soil, rock and shells with roots protruding underneath if you squat to look. The paperweights are becoming miniature worlds hovering in their glass like an enchantment.
Around 1992, Stankard puts people in the worlds, transforming them from innocent flowers to frightening threats. Muscled yet minuscule, the naked forms start out stretched beneath the overhead flowers like yoga devotees, but in later versions they begin to be smothered by the vegetation, clinging to the roots like desperate worms. It’s a very clever exercise in scale, and the viewer looking down gets sucked into the thick clear glass in sympathy.
Stankard experiments with putting these worlds into cubes and black-walled vessels – which end up looking a little Chinese – but the horizontal view puts the viewer in charge and the paperweights lose their power, becoming mere decoration.
In the other half of the gallery, Illinois artist Amy Rueffert also delves into the tiny, with a more tongue-in-cheek approach. Her perfectly sculpted apples, pears and vegetable shapes displayed elegantly on upturned goblets and underneath domes are, in fact, pastel patchworks of subtly subversive images. Vintage childhood decals, gothic-font prayers, happy pictures of babies and puppies comment on social structures and pedestals, and the way Rueffert layers them into her blown glass plays fun tricks with the curve of the objects. There’s all kinds of symbolism, from babies raised by wolves to female sexuality to a giant pill coated with feel-good country-cottage images.
This is certainly not Dale Chihuly: You have to spend time with Rueffert and Stankard, looking carefully at their tiny work. But, as Rueffert points out in the title of her show, the devil is in the details – so it’s worth a good, long look.
Just make sure you can pull yourself out again.
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