Glass unexpected

Glass Center show, award honor the late Ron Desmett

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

If you think you’ve seen it all when it comes to contemporary glass, a surprise awaits at the Pittsburgh Glass Center in Garfield and its exhibition “Making the Ordinary Extraordinary.”

The exhibition honors the late Ron Desmett, who with his wife, Kathleen Mulcahy, were the center’s founding artists. In addition, the inaugural Ron Desmett Memorial Award for Imagination With Glass will be presented this month to Percy Echols. It includes $2,500 in cash and $2,500 worth of studio time at the center.

At 6 p.m. Wednesday, the artists and curators will speak about the works in the gallery. Mr. Echols is not in the exhibition but will talk about his method Aug. 8. Both events are free and public.

“The 15 artists exhibit a diversity of work representing just about every technique in glass and also variety in the aesthetics of the techniques,” said executive director Heather McElwee, who co-curated the exhibition with Ms. Mulcahy.

Some artists were inspired by nature, like Jason Forck, who refers to a group of blown glass vessels with subtle horizontal patterning as landscape studies, or the diorama-like constructs populated by Michael Mangiafico and Ed Pinto’s tiny flameworked insects.

“On the flip side is Margaret Spacapan’s concrete and glass ‘Contained VI,’ for which she takes a formal minimalist approach, stripping extra things away to just look at the material,” Ms. McElwee said.

The two identical parts of Ms. Spacapan’s work are replicas of commercial concrete units that are usually stacked to make a retaining wall. Made of 200 pounds of kiln-formed glass and 600 pounds of cast concrete, they take on the gravitas of reliquaries.

She’s also interested in what happens when you change the medium, or scale, of everyday items. Oversized blown and cold-worked glass vessels retain elegance through impeccable form. “So many simple items we sort of lose sight of,” she said.

Ashley McFarland introduces chance into her work. For the blue cube of “Quadratic Residues,” the