Video still from Tender Glass, 2017
Leslie Waggener Professor in Sculpture Amy Hauft and cultural theorist and art historian Carol Mavor present Tender Glass at testsite 17.1 on Nov 1 with a reception from 5-7pm that will include a reading from Mavor and a conversation between Mavor and Hauft. The exhibition will be on view from Nov 1 - Dec 5, 2017. In addition, Mavor will give a lecture at the Department of Art and Art History on Oct. 31, 2017.
From the press release:
Amy Hauft makes architectural-scale installations in which landscape seems to occur in indoor settings. Each artwork is an intersection of the viewer’s haptic and cognitive experiences. Initially, one’s physical experience takes precedence; eventually, an anomalous logic challenges and concentrates that physical memory.
For Tender Glass, Hauft makes palpable a volumetric experience of water. In a disastrous coincidence, Hurricane Harvey makes that ambition dreadfully poignant.
Salt chair from Tender Glass, 2017
Hauft creates site interventions that intensify the self-consciousness of the viewer as an entity both occupying and moving through a space. She creates circumstances that elicit a viewer’s self-conscious presence. For Tender Glass, she takes the physical parameters of the gallery’s living room as an opportunity for viewers to animistically apprehend the space’s volume. Through modest interventions of a video projection, curtains and a material sleight of hand with the room’s furniture, Hauft makes visceral the proportions and physicality of the space.
On Wednesday, November 1st, Hauft will be joined by cultural theorist and art historian, Carol Mavor, to discuss the material affect of her interventions. Mavor is known for books in which she takes literary and political risks to palpably divine the content of artworks. For this occasion, Mavor has written a fairy tale set within the circumstance of Hauft’s Tender Glass imagery. Designed by Jesse Cline, a printed edition of the story will be available.