Priceless Works is pleased to present Pilchuck Glass School’s 2003 Emerging Artists in Residence (EAiR).

Contact:	Ragan Peck
	Priceless Works Gallery
Address:	619 N. 35th Street, Suite 100
	Seattle, WA 98103
Phone:	206.349.9943
Website:	www.pricelessworksgallery.com
Gallery Hours:	Thursday to Sunday, Noon to 6:00pm Or by Appointment
Show Dates:	October 1st - October 25th, 2004
Opening:	October 1st, 2004 ~ 7:00 to 10:00 PM
Artists:	Evan Blackwell
	Megumi Esaki
	Robert Flottemesch
	Niki Harley
	Hye-Wook Huh
	Elizabeth Nickles

Every year Pilchuck Glass School affords six local, national and international artists a residency to explore and expand the possibilities of glass in their art. It poses a unique and refreshing possibility for artists who already work in the medium of glass as well as those whose portfolios consist of other materials. The show promises to be bursting with vitality and new ways to view glass art.

Pilchuck Glass School is the world’s mecca for the dissemination and enhancement of glass art. The EAiR program is Pilchuck’s outreach to build new frontiers and interests in glass as a sculptural contemporary art medium. The six artists in the show exemplify how glass can evolve and become more of a part of the contemporary art dialogue.

Priceless Works is pleased to continue to highlight the following artists.

Biographies & Highlights of Artists

Evan Blackwell currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington, after receiving a B.F.A. in Ceramics from Alfred University, Alfred, New York. Blackwell’s work is distinguished by his fine appropriation of trash and made multiples, built and constructed into delights for the mind. While visually captivating, they frequently have latent messages about society and our everyday role as consumers. Blackwell’s visual protest of imperialist and military culture that will be on view at the Priceless Works includes roman columns of used coffee mug, flanking a sea of army men.
Blackwell used the residency to create “installations with glass forms that explore concepts about weight, mass, space and time” by assembling cast or slumped glass parts to create larger architectural and vessel forms. Most recently one of Blackwell’s vessels was on view at Pottery Northwest’s well acclaimed Ikebana exhibition. This vessel was constructed out of cast children’s army figurines with, of course, a lush ikebana arrangement growing from it. Nearly a trite, overwrought concept – flowers and war – and yet it held up to the scrutiny.

Megumi Esaki, an M.F.A. graduate of Japan’s Aichi University, works to create unique living spaces focusing on connected or constructed figures of glass. Esaki’s current work emphasizes big basins displayed with water to “express the movement of wind and air, and light and shadow.” Esaki has a methodic sensitivity to texture, color and space. She first came to Pilchuck as a student in Deborah Czeresko’s hot sculpting course in 2000.

Robert Flottemesch’s work emphasizes obsession and growth though the integration of natural materials (wood and now glass) with metal. The metal pieces in his work are viewed as the growth or possibly a skin on the glass and wood forms. He engenders a tension of form versus material relationship (Are the materials parasitic? Or symbiotic?) leading the viewer to question and examine his unspoiled works of fiction.
Flottemesch used his residency to investigate the seamless integration of steel and copper into glass in an attempt to transcend the technique.

Niki Harley is a recent M.F.A. graduate of Monash University, Canberra, Australia. Harley makes sculptural glass to “transform ancient technologies of rope and glass-making into [a] contemporary cultural expression.” She makes scaled versions rope and maritime knots. Beautiful and solid, Harley’s cast glass objects ranscend the allure of glass with masculine appeal. Harley used her residency to work in Pilchuck’s kiln studio refining and exploring further the avenues of her art glass. Harley first visited the Pilchuck campus in 2002 and returned in the fall of 2003 as an EAiR.

Hye-Wook Huh, is a Korean national and graduate of the Southern Illinois University M.F.A. program, and also a frequent Pilchuck student (2000 - 2003). Huh’s work revolves around the complexities of our attraction to glass. Utilizing light and shadow to highlight the medium's simple beauty and architecture, her cast pieces become chambers of light and shadow, mapping space. Other more ephemeral works include grass, turf, and water – these delight the senses – hard impenetrable glass juxtaposed to soft chlorophyll blades of grass rising from rich decomposing soil. Huh generates simple and elegant statements enhanced only by the beauty of the materials she employs.

Elisabeth Nickles, a Philadelphia-based artist, focuses her pursuits on the realm of the forest. Working from a narrative based iconography she creates fantastic tales illustrated with glass, bronze and other materials. Rabbits morphing out of branches and a little deer head alone amongst the trees are among the motifs she employs. She winds tales with the imagination and cunning, mincing metaphor and with fiction.
Her efforts at Pilchuck were in favor of a large scale installation at Philadelphia's Schmidt-Dean Gallery. An M.F.A. graduate of Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Nickles continues to develop cast glass and multimedia sculptural installations examining landscape as external and internal metaphor.

Please join us at Priceless Works on October 1st to celebrate the artist with libations and live glassblowing. Don’t forget to visit the many Art Venues in Fremont on our First Friday Art Walk!

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Pilchuck Glass School receives generous annual support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Washington State Arts Commission, PONCHO, The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the Kreielsheimer Remainder Foundation, and many generous individuals.