Hello,
I hope you are not presently melting. Speaking of melting, I have two relatively new large fused glass panel pieces in a group show opening up here in NYC on Thursday, July 11. 1, 2.
COSMIC DISCO
Natani Notah, John Opera, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Kazuhito Tanaka, and Pedro Vaz
July 11 - August 16, 2024
Opening Reception, Thursday, July 11, 5 - 8pm
Here are some images of the works in progress over 2022-2023, as they took a while in the studio to find their form:
The graphic nature of these two works, and their rectangular shapes made me think of them as almost glass flags.
A flag is a symbol. A flag is an image. A flag is a banner. A flag is something you exist under. A flag is flat. A flag is like money; it represents something only if we believe in it and even if we don’t.
<AMERICAN
see also TARGET see also JASPER JOHNS see also red and white stripes see also playing cards see also bloodied garment. See also womens work.
An American flag has got to be one of the most fraught and absurd things to possibly try to write about or analyze. Shorthand for power. Shorthand for history. Ahistorical and aestheticized. I mean, the fact that we are stuck on 50 stars because of the fifty nifty united states, but really it could have been a different number, the states are not equal, the territories are maybe not added because of colonialism and subjugation but maybe it’s really just the loss of the symmetry, the possible loss of a nice round divisible rhymable number. A fiction on a fiction. But recognizable as a national flag, a horizontal rectangle. It’s a horizontal rectangle, double sided, soft and fly-able, announcing its intentions.
<PENNANT
I don’t know the origin of pennant flags. I mean I know the single pennant, an elongated triangle that’s also an arrow pointing right, made of felt and sports and enthusiasm. But the pennant flags I’m talking about come on a string. Are plastic, flap in the wind at a county fair or a car dealership. Multi-color fully saturated red blue yellow green white and red. Mid-20th century colors, primary colors, before design pink and beige and curlicue lettering took over the aesthetics of our public square.
Pennant flags in the wind look a little bit like birds, except their materiality is so flimsy plastic and artificial that it feels absurd to claim birds in the same sentence as plastic pennants.
The pennant flags define an area. They pen in. They indicate prescribed fun and delineate where it happens, but like the green grass lawn of Blue Velvet, they are also suburban malaise. Temporary fairgrounds, invisible transient workers, mixing of people for the sake of the children. Daylight and nighttime differential.