Who is Katherine Gray?
Katherine Gray employs the stealthy qualities of glass and the history of blown glass to express her thoughts on larger issues such as the environment, society and community. His practice focuses on the material qualities of glass itself: its ability to be psychologically absent and physically invisible in its everyday, scientific and technological use, but also to be the substance of the sublime. The Los Angeles Times praised Gray's works for "emphasizing the broad potential of the medium". For Katherine Gray, glass is a material of otherworldly perfection and mundane familiarity. The artist stated: “I am trying to play out the polarities between the use of the material and the sphere in which it exists, who makes it, who uses it, who values it and trying to point out some of the inequalities.”
Katherine Gray Career
Katherine Gray studied at the Ontario College of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design. Currently, Katherine Gray is a professor at California State University, San Bernardino and appears in Season 1 and upcoming Season 2 of the Netflix reality show, Blown Away. His works are in the permanent collections of public institutions, including the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; Museum of American Glass, Wheaton, NJ; the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, and Toyama City Institute of Glass Art, Toyama, Japan.
The tradition of glass in the work of Katherine Gray
Drawing on the rich traditions of glassblowing and a fascination with glass as a visual and experiential encounter, Katherine Gray creates work that ranges from sculptures to glass installations. A visitor favorite at The Corning Museum of Glass is his work Forest Glass, a large-scale installation composed of glass that creates the illusion of trees. Through installations and works Katherine Gray compels the viewer to appreciate glass again.
The artist stated: “I use a material that we don't generally see. It is often flawlessly clear and colorless, hence invisible in that regard, but it can also be so ubiquitous and banal that it does not register in our psyches either. It is a material that allows us unparalleled connectivity (via smart phones and fiber optics) yet also serves to separate us. To my mind, these two polarities are what set this material apart from so many others, and one of the reasons that I feel compelled to keep working with it as an artistic medium. It is both present and absent, known and unknown, and vacillating between a state of mundane familiarity and otherworldly perfection.”
Ephemerality and color in the art of Katherine Gray
In the exhibition, Radiant Mirage, Katherine Gray turned her considerable glassmaking skills to create objects that serve two purposes: bringing beauty to a terrible time in the world and expressing her frustrations with the loss of our collective sense of safety and security. well-being. The common thread is the use of iridescence, an optical phenomenon seen in nature and inspired by unearthed ancient glass. Like the natural phenomena caused by the refraction of light, Gray Entities and Tubes emphasize the uniqueness and inconstancy of objects that project an ephemeral form and a play of colors that our eyes do not fully comprehend.
