Glass On Newsstands

The Fall 2015 edition of GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly(#140) is hitting newsstands and subscriber mailboxes. On the cover is a work by French installation artist Baptiste Debombourg, who created a room with massive windows collapsing inward. Contributing editor Victoria Josslin presents a meditation on Debombourg's grand catastrophe in Aerial (a 2012 site-specific installation at the Brauweiler Abbey near Cologne, Germany), considering the scene as a frozen moment just after the impact of some cataclysmic explosion outside. In another Debombourg work, a fractured bus shelter titled Crystal Palace looks like a Paris landmark after a brutally destructive riot. As we are inundated with images and news of our increasingly tumultuous times, Debombourg's artifacts of unnamed violence tap into our collective unease and provoke not just reflection but, potentially, action. Josslin ponders whether it would be accurate to consider this work conceptual, or if it requires another term to encompass its multilayered yet open-ended impact on viewers.  

The Fall 2015 issue also examines WheatonArt's bold bid to elevate its visibility by drawing top name artist to Millville, New Jersey, for a project entitled "Emanation," a year-long creative collaboration with 11 artists including Judy Pfaff, Donald Lispky, Mark Dion, and Paula Hayes, to name just four. The "Emanation" museum opening coincided with the 2015 Glass Weekend event, and brought together the established glass collector world with a new kind of work in glass that might represent an exciting future direction for this arts organization that offers one of the most important residencies for up-and-coming artists.