Josiah McElheny at AC Project Room

Art in America, March, 1998 by Gregory Volk

Josiah McElheny is an unusual figure among younger artists, most obviously because he's an expert glassblower whose education consisted in part of apprenticeships with European masters. His blown-glass plates, bowls, vessels and goblets are seductive, gorgeous objects, but they typically involve all sorts of conceptual twists and surprises, too. In this exhibition, it was ambiguous whether his pieces were intended as originals, as copies of historical works or, even more elusively, as "copies" of objects which may never have existed. Here, five recent works, sometimes accompanied by explanatory texts of dubious veracity, skittered across eras, probing our assumptions about historical artifacts.

Verzelini's Acts of Faith (glass from paintings of the life of Christ) is a dark wooden cabinet filled with various pieces of glassware aligned in four rows. The ensemble mimics what you'd find in a museum, right down to a convincing text which attributes everything on view to a 16th-century Italian glassblower named Giacomo Verzelini. According to the text, Verzelini based these pieces on glass objects found in Renaissance paintings dealing with the life of Christ -- glasses on the table in different renderings of the Last Supper, for instance, or a whitestriped vessel at the feet of the crucified Jesus. The twist is that all of the glass pieces were made by McElheny himself, who did indeed use such paintings as models. What results is a reeling conflation of fact and fiction, present and past.

McElheny's work also has a pronounced visual power. Tribute to Female Beauty, an elegant, curvaceous goblet shaped as a female torso, picks up on a kitschy and (as the accompanying text says) "lascivious" tangent in the history of glassmaking. Studies for the Search for Infinity consists of seven plates, leaning on a shelf covered with dark fabric, that are decorated with perspectival patterns made of white glass pressed into transparent glass. On the opposite wall, also leaning on a shelf, was The Search for Infinity, a solitary plate decorated with circling and spiraling patterns made of tiny air bubbles, loosely suggesting a star-filled sky. This piece, McElheny's updating of Renaissance techniques for physically manifesting the concept of infinity, seemed downright cosmic and transcendent.