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FORM & PLACE

Jane RosenAnn Hollingsworth

essay by Maria Porges

23 Sunnyside Ave. l Mill Valley, CA 94941 l 415.384.8288 l seagergray.com

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Exhibition Dates:October 1 - November 10, 2013Reception for the artists: Friday, October 4, 5 to 7 PM Essay by Maria Porges

Front Cover: Studio Shot with work by Jane Rosen and Ann Hollingsworth Page 4: Dark Amber, 2008, archival pigment print, 22 x 15” Photography Credits: Photographs for Jane Rosen, Dona Tracy Photographs for Ann Hollingsworth, Petra Liljestrand Direct inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 23 Sunnyside Ave. Mill Valley, CA 94941 415.384.8288 art@seagergray.com All Rights Reserved

FORM & PLACE: Jane Rosen and Ann Hollingsworth

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Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see; these are: darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, move-ment and rest.” --Leonardo Da Vinci

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Prologue

For thousands of years, birds—able to roam earth, sky and sea-- have represented the ideas of freedom and eternal life. Their nest homes, in contrast, symbolize safety and retreat, especially in the modern world.

The complexity of these ideas is embodied in language itself. Free as a bird im-plies a limitless lack of attachment, while nesting is the word we use to describe the process of settling down and creating a cozy, enveloping, nurturing environment. Yet free birds do make nests, staying there long enough to raise their young. In Form and Place, the works of artists Jane Rosen and Ann Hollingsworth offer us a chance to reflect on the these complex and sometimes paradoxical ideas, as represented in extraordinary sculpture, painting and drawing.

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Grey Guston, 2013 kiln cast crystal and beach fossil stone 38 x 18 x 32”

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Egyptian art is rich with representations of over 70 species of birds—from the ibis and vulture to swallows, hoopoes and lap-wings-- but the first to come to mind are images of falcons. New Yorker Jane Rosen recalls spending many hours as a girl in the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian wing, studying these proud symbols of Horus the sun god, giver of life: one of the central deities—if not the central deity—of the Egyptian pantheon. A Brooklyn native, Rosen studied at New York University and then the Art Student’s League in the early 70s. Birds appear in her work as early as that same decade, in the form of abstracted wall-hung heads, which evolved gradually into freestanding figures in the ‘80s. She became interested in raptors through staying with a friend who ran a raptor rescue center in upstate New York, even requiring her students to ‘adopt’ one the birds and help care for it—and draw it--as part of a class requirement.

But after twenty years of living and working in New York City, Rosen wanted to go “where nature was bigger than culture,” as she has put it. During what was intended to be a sabbatical break, she crossed the country to live for a few months on a friend’s horse ranch near San Gregorio, a few miles south of the Bay Area. In this area of extraordinary natural beauty, she found herself watching the birds—the hawks that wheel and float on the currents of warm and cool air that rise from the ground at different times of day, the ravens and crows, the darting swallows. She remembers seeing a hawk on the first day at the ranch, and hearing a voice in her head saying, -stay and tell my story. For a decade she shuttled back and forth between both coasts, but finally sold her NY loft to settle on her own California ranch.

The works in this exhibition include examples of Rosen’s work featuring birds in a range of media-- drawing, prints and glass sculpture. For the last 15 years, she has made three-dimensional pieces predominantly in this difficult but rewarding medium, directing talented glass blower Ross Richmond. Sleek forms like Praying Raven (2012) are created out of the hot, semi-liquid material and treated

with glass pigments and marble dust. Each piece begins with Rosen’s drawings, but evolves over the session, during which Richmond gradually creates the form that she envisions as she stands nearby, often with a tool to help.

The resulting birds are both highly specific and abstracted, delicate and invincible -- as if seen from a distance: the way we most often do encounter them, either at rest or in the air. Like the Egyptian falcons Rosen visited in her weekly trips to the Met, these birds are archetypes, embodying the fundamental characteristics of bird-ness.

I. Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works. - Alma Gluck

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Ann Hollingsworth’s spiky, luminous glass nests are metaphors. Their forms, invoking the intricate, twiggy constructions assembled by hawks or eagles, are perched on greenish, icy-looking slabs of glass or rough wooden blocks, stone boulders or plinths, all of which suggest a resting place between worlds—as if these complicated masses of translucent ‘twigs’ are portals, glowing from within as the glass captures light.

Hollingsworth has remarked that people should have to build their own nests, as a way of learning how to be in nature. Studying a work like Ice Plant and Night Sea (2013) suggests what kind of knowledge we might absorb through such an exercise. The spear-shaped pieces out of which it is woven almost seem to be conjured out of ice itself, an impression enhanced by the glossy, amberish

pooling inside the center of the structure. A nest like this embodies the idea of a transitional moment-- between liquid and solid, sleep and wakefulness. It also suggests that anywhere can be a place to rest and find comfort. In Osprey 2 (2013), twigs of yellowish glass decrease in size towards the nest’s center, to a few delicate, dark threads. The piece’s boulder perch invokes the kind of astonishingly precarious locations in which such nests are often built: atop posts or signs, outdoor lights or rocky outcroppings. Internet pictures show workers removing nests from the gridwork of electric towers or the crossed beams of telephone poles.

Ice Plant and Night Sea, 2013 kiln cast crystal 5.5 x 14 x 13”

right, Osprey 2, 2013 (detail) kiln cast crystal

11 x 27 x 22”

II. In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.― - Robert Lynd

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Last Skyscraper, 2012 (forward left), Grey Guston, 2013 (forward right)installation shot kiln cast glass, limestone and marble

Hollingsworth’s preferred technique for working with glass is casting, rather than blowing. The two methods, radically different in approach to the same material, generate qualities that are equally distinct. Blown pieces are made by gather-ing liquid glass on the end of a long metal pipe out of a hot furnace and shaping it skillfully with tools over a matter of an hour or two, and have a smoothness of form that reflects their origins in fire. Cast glass begins as a sculpture made out of some other material, from which a mold is made. Wax is then poured into that mold to make a replica of the original; after this first mold is removed, a refractory shell is built around the wax version, out of which the wax is then steamed or burned. This shell-mold is placed in a kiln and glass is slowly melted into it, over several hours or even days. After cooling, the mold material is cleaned off; the resulting sculpture can be angular or round, rough or smooth.

Hollingsworth studied casting at California College of the Arts, where she returned to school in the early 2000s to com-plete her education. She first met Jane around the same time, introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Not long afterwards, at a drawing workshop at Jane’s studio Ann had an opportunity to see Jane’s work, including birds carved out of stone. She approached Jane with the idea that the birds she was making could evoke a different set of qualities and ideas if they were made from cast glass, and offered to help her learn how.

Early experiments were unsuccessful, but about three years ago, things clicked, and they began having success. In White Scarf Skyscraper and Last Skyscraper (2012-2013), both included in this exhibition, a raptor perches on top of a tall, slender pedestal that evokes the tall buildings of Manhattan. These works, initially begun not long after the events of 9/11, became part of Rosen’s long farewell to New York City.

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The most recent cast glass piece in Form and Place is Grey Guston (2013), a falcon-like bird perched on a fossil rock (whose shape resembles a face in a painting by Philip Guston, according to Rosen-- thus the name of the piece). In direct light, parts of the chiseled-looking bird glow golden, as if lit from within.

Reflecting on her boldness in offering Rosen her help, Hollingsworth now laughs, but over the years that they have experimented together to find a way to express the qualities of Rosen’s drawings through casting techniques, both artists have gained something important. Hollingsworth’s commitment to her work has focused in a new way. In the past, she had moved rapidly from subject to subject, more interested in the process—in the experiments, rather than the results. For the fully-realized group of nests, she owes a debt of gratitude to Rosen’s example. Rosen, for her part, has had the opportunity to see the sleek, softened forms of her birds take on a different set of qualities. She has also thoroughly enjoyed the experimentation, which harks back to the process art movement that was so influential during her school years in New York. Both women look forward to continuing their work, together and apart.

Maria Porges2013

Last Skyscraper, 2012 , detail kiln cast glass, limestone and marble

65 x 14 x 24”

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Accipiter Large, 2013, (right)hand blown pigmented glass

20 x 5.5 x 4”

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Jane Rosen

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Grey Guston, 2013 kiln cast crystal and beach fossil stone

38 x 18 x 32” (closeup and side view)

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White Scarf Skyscraper, 2012 kiln cast glass, limestone and marble

65 x 10 x 11.5”detail (left)

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White Kite, 2013Pigment and beeswax on archival pigment print 16 x 28”

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Painted Raven, 2013coffee, Korean watercolor, beeswax on archival pigment print on clay ground

52 x 42”

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Praying Raven, 2012 hand blown pigmented glass 16 x 6 x 5”

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Accipiter Large, 2010 hand blown pigmented glass

20 x 5.5 x 4”

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Osprey II, 2013 (right) kiln cast crystal

11 x 27 x 22”

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Ann Hollingsworth

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Drift, (2013) kiln cast crystal 9.5 x 12.25 x 6”

Branches and Leaves, 2013 (right), kiln cast crystal

9 x 18 x 16”

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Nesting Place, 2013 (left) kiln cast crystal 8.5 x 12 x 9”

Osprey I, 2013 (right) kiln cast crystal

9 x 19 x 18”

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Ice Plant and Night Sea, 2013 hand blown pigmented glass 5.5 x 14 x 13”

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Winter, 2013 kiln cast crystal 10.5 x 9.5 x 8.5”