After a summer show in Monterey brought the reclusive sculptor's work back into public view, the studio-glass pioneer exhibits in Millerton with pieces he's held onto across a five-decade career.
September 5–November 8, artist reception Saturday, September 26, 3–5pm | Millerton, NY
Mad Rose Gallery presents "Rough Diamonds," a solo exhibition by William Carlson bringing together a selection of sculptures the artist has kept close throughout his career. It's the second regional showing this year for the 75-year-old artist, following "Two to Tango" at Gallerie 271 in Monterey this past Memorial Day weekend—a show that marked, by Carlson's own account, the first time in 15 years of living in the Berkshires that he'd made a real effort to be seen by his neighbors.
Carlson originally set out to become an architect, and that training still shapes how he approaches sculpture. He works with combinations of granite, cast glass, "dichroic" glass sourced from Japan, wire, and aerospace-grade adhesives, building abstract architectural compositions defined by precise craftsmanship and a striking sense of visual weightlessness. His formal logic draws as much from geology as art history: the cast glass bound to granite echoes sedimentary rock and agate structures, but the effect in person is closer to something kinetic, despite containing no moving parts. Move around one of his pieces and the light shifts, the transparency changes, the object seems to behave differently depending on where you're standing. "Everything is always in transition," Carlson says. "There's not a time when there is a 'correct' way to view this."
A recurring thread throughout his career is Quipu, the ancient Andean system that conveyed information through networks of knotted and colored strings. Carlson translates that language of knots into cast-glass tiled wall installation.
Carlson's career includes decades of teaching at the University of Illinois and the University of Miami, and his work sits in the permanent collections of more than 20 major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and the Kyoto Museum of Art. His large-scale public commissions include "Allele" at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a wall installation at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange engineered to be both optically mesmerizing and durable enough to withstand attack—each project required him to invent or adapt his own complex process, since the tools to work granite and glass together the way he envisioned simply didn't exist. He's received recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts and the International Glass Award in Sapporo, Japan.
Carlson's flurry of gallery activity has been spurred on by a change of life moment. He's downsizing from the studio and house he's occupied for 15 years and is candid about the physical toll five decades of hauling granite and burning his hands on hot glass have taken on him. But he's made clear the work isn't stopping. "I'll never consider that done," he's says. "That's the reason I'm still making. I still make things."
Mad Rose Gallery, 5916 N. Elm Street, Millerton, NY. More info: Gallery Director Natalie Tyler, natalie@madrosegallery.com.
