El Greco ReVisited

El Greco’s painting Coronation of the Virgin sets the stage for an intersection between glass, action, and painting. A “re-enactment” of the painting with live components, this work focuses not on re-representation but rather on recreating the more ethereal elements of the painting: the clouds, the link to the celestial and spiritual worlds. El Greco’s clouds are at once solid and ephemeral, evoking meta-stable properties similar to the amorphous qualities of glass.

Re-enacting and re-staging these “otherworldly” qualities of El Greco’s clouds, glassblowers fashion bulbous shapes out of Pulegoso glass, a silvery and bubbly glass made by the addition of kerosene to hot glass. A kerosene fireball marks the beginning of the Live Event. The globular glass forms are positioned on a tiered stage to re-create a cloud cluster while they are still warm unstable, crackling and snapping. As the placement of the glass clouds begins, a live model is hoisted on rigging that is suspended from the hot shop amphitheater, housed in the 90-foot-tall stainless-steel cone of the Tacoma Museum glass shop. She hovers just above the cloud-like forms for the duration of the performance.

Participants:  Tacoma glass blowers, Keunae Song, Susie Hwang, Sarah Gilbert (model) and Lorraine Perrin (violin)