December 2011 at Vetri Glass - Seattle
Exhibition Dates: December 1st - 31st, 2011
Artist Reception: First Thursday, December 1st, 5:00-8:00 p.m.
Vetri Glass - Seattle is pleased to introduce New York artist, Erica Rosenfeld in her first solo exhibition with the gallery. Short Stories features a selection of the artist's jewelry and wall-mounted sculptures. Rosenfeld combines various glass and beading techniques to create her meticulously crafted, labor-intensive pieces. She is fascinated by people's habitual behaviors and uses her art to tell stories about the fabric of people's lives and the rituals created to bring comfort to our lives.
Rosenfeld makes work that expresses time, conveys history, and serves as a means to preserve memory. She has always been fascinated by the things-both spiritual and physical-people cling to in order to find and define identity. In her work she points to the shared folklore that families and communities create to memorialize people, places and events, and the ways individuals create personal mythologies to contextualize their past and imagine their future. Throughout her life, Rosenfeld has been a collector, and uses found objects as artifacts in her work's constructed symbology.
At the age of five, Rosenfeld began beading, and as a college student she expanded on that process-oriented, ritualistic practice -- realizing a consistent impulse to create mosaics from smaller elements. Using multiple processes to make components, she sews them together with beads to make her artwork, which not only includes fused beads and tiles, but blown glass and hot-worked elements. She later uses the somewhat ritualized process of cold working to grind away sharp edges, to shape, refine and design. While she's constantly reinventing elements of her process and message, she always remains true to her vision.
Erica Rosenfeld graduated from Kenyon College in 1997 with a BA in metals, focusing on jewelry, then moved to San Francisco where she began to make glass beads and small multi-colored tiles. When she relocated to Brooklyn, she started blowing glass to complement her beadwork. Rosenfeld has taught at Urban Glass in New York, The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass, and Pilchuck Glass School. Her work has been featured in New Glass Review, Glass Magazine, and In Style, and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC as well as the Museum of American Glass in New Jersey.
Contact: Susan Marabito / Director
susan@vetriglass.com
1404 First Avenue, Seattle WA, 98101
Phone: 206.667.9608 Facsimile: 206.621.9447
1821 E Dock St #101, Tacoma WA, 98402
Phone: 253.383.3692 Facsimile: 253.383.3687
Image details: Queen Bee, blown and carved glass, 12"h x 12"w x 5"d, 2011
Photo credit: Brett Swenson
