SOFA 2008

I guess I am not much of a blogger ... too infrequent in posting.

I went to the SOFA show this weekend at Navy Pier, Chicago. As usual with SOFA, the level of craft was high. Unfortunately, with a show this size, the work starts to blur together after a while, and I am sure I missed some pieces. Still, there were some real delights.

What an incredible amount of glass work! Too much -- and I love glass work, especially blown glass. The glass pieces that really stood out for me were the two three dimensional grids of pyrex filament -- basically drawing in three dimensions with the glass filaments. These were at Jane Sauer Gallery's booth, but I lost the name of the artist.

UPDATE: I had the chance to look at the Jane Sauer Gallery website, and I was disappointed that the pyrex forms shown there were decorative representational objects, like a chair and a basket ... to me less interesting that the 3-D grid and interrupted 3-D grid that was at SOFA. Still, I very much like the technique and commend the artist.

Outside of the glass work, Marian Bijenga's (Cervini Haas Gallery) horsehair/fabric wall hanging grids -- little spots of fabric connected by thread (fishing line?) in morphed grids -- were delightful floating spots of color. I checked them out online at the Gallery's website, and the pictures really do not do the work justice. The detail shots that show individual horsehair/fabric "spots" are okay, and in truth, each spot as a vignette was more noteworthy and intriguing than the overall arrangement of spots. Still, in person, the arrangement was much, much better than the picture on the website would reflects.

I also was drawn to crocheted metal forms by another artist (can't read her name in my notes, but the gallery was Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art) because the pieces made hard what is normally soft (hard metal in place of soft yarn).

There were some intriguing thread bare fiber pieces, intriguing more from the technique than the use of the technique. The technician in me is wondering how difficult it is to pull out so many threads and still leave enough in place, given difficulties I have had doing this with canvas.