Antigravity: Needle-and-bowl by Melissa Vandenberg

Transcript

[Music] in 2019 our annual theme that is really uniting all of our exhibitions and programming is questioning identity melissa Vandenberg's proposal for a needle and bowl really aligned with this her work is very figural the handkerchiefs are representative of the individuals that owned them and used to them so it was a really good fit for the conversations that we were going to be having this year I'm Melissa Vandenberg I was originally born in Detroit Michigan very multidisciplinary I don't tend to stick with one medium too long but when I return to regularly is textiles and fibers in particular I knew I was going to be the second artist after Krystle Gregory's work which gave me an opportunity to actually do a site visit and see a previous anteye-gravity work it did take several generations of sketching and planning I started by shooting photographs of this space and then literally drawing on top of those photographs different trajectories that this compass inspired for might take when I'm working site specifically with a venue I'm really interested in creating something that would guide visitors into the Space Needle and Bowl is referencing one of the ancient ways of making a compass I think that's a very lovely analogy of how visitors are stopping and pausing and that rotunda in that architectural space taking a minute to reorient themselves before they start navigating their own journey the handkerchiefs that she has used really are figural they're representative of humans the handkerchiefs that we use are embedded with our DNA they're markers of the individual person many are store bought a lot of souvenirs that people may have purchased during a family vacation but a lot of them are actually altered by hand and have homemade crocheted edges tatted corners homemade monograms of a loved one the sort of things that we don't tend to take the time to do with things that we purchased today the pieces in part cannibalized from a previous work that I had installed at the Lexington Art League in Kentucky that piece was called forget-me-not I think it spoke really heavily to the specific sentiment of these souls that feel like might be represented in the textile that's featured but needle and Bowl becomes more site-specific to Corning Melissa came to Corning to oversee the installation of her commissioned piece the week after that we sponsored her as the artist in residence at the hot shop amphitheater at the Corning Museum of Glass that gave her the opportunity to work with the gaffers in designing in a brand new medium for her I was interested in recreating some of the drawings I've been doing that have very simple house shapes to do a home inspired shape a domestic form and a fragile material like glass the underlying thought behind that is to get some money out of their comfort zone expose them to a new medium and a new way of thinking about that medium and then when they go back to their own practice they're going to be thinking about what they do in a different light I love that model where you're sort of thrown in the deep end and to develop a game plan but be willing to kind of abandon that game plan and stay agile as you learned about the medium when you come to the museum be sure that you take advantage of all the vantage points of this object you have this sort of big welcoming moment where many people can view this piece simultaneously but when you're actually up in one of the galleries it's a more intimate moment the antigravity project is a wonderful way for us to engage emerging artists and to also involve artists from a diversity of backgrounds it will be ever-changing it will be dramatic it will be something that catches your attention and gives you pause when you walk through the door [Music]