San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
SUBVERTING THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
Emerging female artists tackle gender stereotypes.
On a recent visit to San Francisco retailer Gump’s, artist Katherine Vetne and collector Richard Ford perused the store’s famous crystal department for almost an hour with gallerist Catharine Clark and her associate director, Anton Stuebner.
Gump’s, the venerated 157-year-old San Francisco department store, is in the midst of a liquidation sale as the business will likely close permanently by the end of the year. Vetne and Ford looked at items including crystal animal figurines, candy dishes and even a massive crystal table before settling on a pair of Baccarat wine glasses to purchase. The retail price for a pair of Baccarat wine glasses runs between
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$130 to $200 per glass, but these were marked down 30 percent — as was most of the store’s merchandise.
“These have a nice weight to them; the thickness of the stems is good, too,” says Vetne. “I bet it will melt beautifully.”
Vetne, 31, of San Francisco, has been building a reputation as a sculptor who works in an unusual medium: destruction. Vetne’s bestknown work during the past three years has been a series of sculptures made from kilnmelted housewares crystal, which takes a puddle-like shape when heated.
She then “mirrors” the melted crystal mass in a chemical process that turns the blobs into reflective objects. The pieces are presented individually or in groups, like in her “Guilty Pleasure” installation that was part of the Catharine Clark Gallery’s summer show, “We tell ourselves stories ... In order to live.” Ford and Vetne took the shopping trip at Clark’s invitation to find the raw material for a piece Ford recently commissioned from Vetne.
“Distortion can be a powerful tool for critique,” Vetne says. “That’s part of what I employ in my work.”
The idea of working with crystal, whether it’s fine Baccarat or more mass-market Avon, appeals to Vetne, who is interested in exploring issues of class, gender and materialism. “At the crux of my practice is the more middle-class people with some amount of resources trying to look ‘higher class’ than they are through the objects they acquire. I am interested in concepts of visual excess and how they’re supposed to communicate something. Usually, it’s ‘I have a lot of money.’ ”
Her inspiration to work in crystal came from a butter dish. Specifically a Waterford butter dish that a bride who shared Vetne’s name requested on her Macy’s wedding registry.
“It was hundreds of dollars; I was so fascinated by it,” Vetne says. “I kept asking myself things like, ‘What kind of person thinks they need or deserve something like that, a butter