Yesterday we looked at the origins of Karen LaMonte glass work. Today she wrestles with scaling up her glass dresses.
At UrbanGlass (New York) and Pilchuck, (Washington State) where LaMonte was creating most of her work, there were technical limitations that made it impossible for her to attain her final goal of making a life-sized dress. So after a year or so of research, LaMonte decided that the only place where these pieces could be realized would be in the Czech Republic. The casting facilities there were already geared towards large-scale work and had been producing monumental pieces for artists like Libensky ́ and Brychtová. The only problem was that the Czech aesthetic tended towards complete geometrical abstraction so LaMonte knew that it would be a challenge for them to create detailed figurative molds.
In 1998 LaMonte received a Fulbright Fellowship to go to the Czech Republic to study glass casting with Zdeneˇk Lhotsky ́ at the famous Pelechov studio founded by Jaroslava Brychtová in the 1950s. LaMonte says of her initial experience, “I was nervous to introduce my dress project to Lhotsky ́ since it differs so greatly from Czech glass, but he was excited by the idea and enthusiastic about the challenge of making such a complicated piece. The mold makers themselves were even more excited—it was refreshing for them to see something new.” She started by making a cast of a child’s dress and much to the factory workers surprise wanted to participate in the fabrication process. This flies in the face of the traditional way of working in the Czech Republic where there is a complete disjunction between the artist/designer and the fabricators. LaMonte’s interest in learning in detail the casting process from start to finish however, turned out to be quite important as it allowed her to build a relationship with the workers and gave them the impetus to push the envelope of their skills.
Over the next two years LaMonte continued to work with the Pelechov factory and began to work on larger molds. She used art students, prostitutes and herself as models for the interiors of a series of human-scaled pieces. These waxes took several months to produce. LaMonte says, “The human body is the single thing that everyone has in common—it is a universal form which speaks to everyone on a personal level. Scale was extremely important to me—the cast glass pieces are made from found objects in their original state—so the final pieces needed to exist on a human scale so they would possess human presence.” Once the waxes were created she made castings of the bodies and then added clothing to these forms. She then took waxes of the clothing and made molds of the clothed bodies. Once these were completed she made hollow castings that would articulate the interior and exterior forms. One concession that LaMonte had to make though, was that the pieces that were larger than three or four feet tall would have to be made in several parts—as even the annealers at Pelechov are not large enough to accommodate anything larger and there would be too high of a risk of mold failure.
The fruits of her labor were realized in 2000 when the first series of dresses that were cast at Pelechov were shown at the Heller Gallery and at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in NewYork. LaMonte showed several types of pieces: large bas-reliefs and the multipart hollow cast pieces. In her most recent body of work Dress 4 and 6, 2001 and the smaller Dress 3 and 5, 2001, LaMonte has finally hit her stride. Over the past two years the factory has been able to learn how to refine the mold-making process and the casting of the pieces to create sculptures that perfectly captured a sense of temporality and the gray area between the recognition of the human form and the complete absence of the appendages, head usually, associated with the body. As well, LaMonte has been working on a series of prints made by inking dresses that she showed alongside the dress during her last solo exhibition at the Heller Gallery in May, 2001.
See more of Karen LaMonte’s works here