Carnival in Glass: Judith Schaechter
Daria Brit Shapiro
Judith Schaechter, Body Bag.
Judith Schaechter, a 2005 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, inaugurates the new location of the Claire Oliver gallery with an intrepid exhibition of stained glass works. Following her four-museum touring exhibition, "Extra Virgin," Schaechter’s "Seeing is Believing" provides a glimpse into the artist’s exquisitely paradoxical world. Consisting of her signature lightboxes, a remarkable large glass installation and several drawings, this exhibition illuminates Schaechter’s extraordinary versatility and groundbreaking advances in the stained glass genre.
The namesake work, "Seeing is Believing," is a 16 foot tall stained glass installation that fills the front fa�ade of the gallery with a dazzling array of color and form. This non-ecclesiastical rose window represents a departure from figuration for Schaechter. Swarming with colorful mandala shapes, "Seeing is Believing" is built with layer upon layer of meticulously composed stained glass. The light filtered through this bold work inundates the front room of the gallery with a warm glow, casting kaleidoscopic shadows across the floor. Suddenly, one feels like a character lost inside Schaechter’s bizarre carnival, an almost dizzying experience.
The main gallery space houses 12 stunning examples of Schaechter’s signature stained glass lightboxes, which exist as glowing portals into a bizarre and beautiful world. The works are haunting parables, rendered in a complex visual language that cultivates a fascination with death, decay and the moral trappings inherent in the act of being human. These uncomfortable and oftentimes grotesque themes are presented in the highly aestheticized medium of stained glass, steeped in the mysticism and religious ecstasy for which the genre is renowned. Quite unlike traditional experiences of stained glass, these works engage the viewer in visual narratives situated outside the conventional religious context; this exhibition is no cause for solemnity.
In Schaechter’s work, the existence of a single thaumaturgical god is subverted, through the use of widely varied symbols that traverse all forms of human emotion without any allegiance to one prevailing culture or system of belief. In her meticulous and fascinating work, Specimens, Schaechter delights in a strange totemism with the appearance of fantastical creatures that wear startling human expressions; one cannot help but think that these are signifiers for a darker underlying code.
Female figures often appear in imaginary historical context: The Wreck of Isabelle A depicts an old-fashioned ship on fire, floating in a stormy sea; an ethereal, naked woman stands underwater, seeming to welcome the tragic ship to the abyss. Blood-red under-sea flora, resembling veins, crawl over the glass, heightening the ocean’s bodily aspect, while the viewer is left to wonder: which is the wreck, the woman or the ship?
Schaechter’s characters are constantly confronting their own mortality; transcending the material world, they exist in a suspended limbo. In her lightbox, Body Bag, a body floats against a yellow background, partially zipped up in a toe-tagged black bag. From the bag issues a dream-like cloud depicting man’s evolution with images layered upon each other: a dinosaur skeleton, the hazy form of a woman, swirling planets and constellations. In these works, death is integral to the search for a superior reality.
Also on view are several pencil drawings of single figures, highlighting the artist’s incredible draftsmanship, which is the foundation of her stained glass works.�Schaechter, a self-professed "compulsive doodler," begins each of her glass pieces with a series of automatic drawings, from which arise the characters that appear in her narratives, frozen in time. The artist’s stained glass windows are made from several layers of thin "flash glass"; through both etching and sandblasting this delicate material, Schaechter creates panels of intense, saturated color. No element is superfluous, each winding vein and twisting vine contributes to the atmosphere of the piece. The work is shockingly physical, with figural elements painted directly onto the glass, betraying the presence of the artist’s hand and lending a human quality, so that each of these frozen worlds reads as a body of sorts, with its own peculiar physical characteristics.
Simply by subverting religious contexts, a strange fanaticism with morality has taken shape in Schaechter’s works. Straddling the line between the sacred and the profane, Schaechter’s stained glass lightboxes give us the viewer a glimpse into a carnivalesque world of twisted morality through explorations both earthly and celestial. Rendered in a highly ornamental style, with narrative themes that indulge in obscure and sumptuous imagery, recognizable emotions, and uncanny juxtapositions, Schaechter wrings from her figures an enigmatic symbolism and perverse irony. Both darkly satirical and romantic at once, Schaechter’s works shake up the age-old binaries of beautiful/grotesque, real/unreal, while creating a fresh, maverick approach to contemporary art-making.
