‘Cutting Edge’ presents the work of three artists who employ glass to create intriguing and insightful art.  Mahine Rattonsey and Chrissy Lapham combine glass with other materials while Anne Gant uses glass to make her work, but there is no glass in the artwork. 

Anne Gant forms hot glass then burns it into paper.  On Y.O.H. Gallery’s website it states “Anne Gant may be the only glass artist whose work is made of paper.”

Gant’s burned panels of paper are presented as evidence. Evidence of what is an intriguing question.  They echo traditional glass forms but also evoke bones, long ago discarded artifacts or fossils.  Gant creates imagery that is not literal but is undeniable in its ability to depict something that is not there.  The branded marks read like browned edges of old paper; singed by the passage of time itself, but they are also a record of an incendiary moment. The large scale of some of these pieces further enables the viewer to savor the simple yet richly mysterious imagery.

Mahine Rattonsey works in flameworked glass often combining it with other materials like steel and found objects.  She creates artworks that are derived from personal realities and realizations.   Her use of simple everyday forms like beds, windows, vines and thorns, create a metaphoric language that communicates complex themes to the viewer. The results are poignant revelations about relationships with self, with others and with expectations; both private ones and cultural ones. Ultimately Rattonsey demonstrates a sharp awareness of dualities that shape experience. The viewer will come away with the sense that Rattonsey is fearlessly introspective yet reveals universal truths.

Chrissy Lapham, of Corning is a recent graduate of Alfred University. She combines a variety of techniques and mediums including blown glass, carved wood and light. Lapham juxtaposes incongruent materials like fur and glass to produce fascinating vignettes. The precarious compositions, like the off-kilter angles in Awakened Landscape, further add to to an elegant tension that Lapham develops in her work.  The natural forms and visual layers provide the viewer glimpses, both literally and figuratively, into discordance and give an awareness of an unending search for equilibrium.