PICTORIAL
There’s a human impulse to preserve life’s blissful moments—a quick scroll through your camera roll will probably give you plenty of evidence—one Carly Glovinski gives into by bottling up the rich, swirling gradients the cloak the sky at day’s end. Her ongoing Canning the Sunset project layers hand-colored sand in reused glass jars to capture the last hours of light before they descend into dusk.
Now stored in hundreds of vessels in various shapes and sizes, the grainy compositions range from subtle pastel palettes to vibrant oranges and yellows, rationing the short-lived hues “for times of scarcity,” Glovinski says. “The sunset marks the sky with color in a fleeting moment each day, slipping down behind the horizon like grains of sand through an hourglass. To try and capture it, contain it, or possess it is a futile, and impossible gesture. ”
Artist Shayna Leib finds inspiration in wind and water for her intricate and delicate glass sculptures. Thousands of hand-pulled canes are affixed into improvised compositions that mimic sea life swept by natural forces. Custom hues accentuate the soft appearance of the sculptures while contrasting the nature of the material and the caneworking process.
As Leib explains on her website, cane pulling involves layering colorants between gathers of molten glass and stretching it into rods. Two of the artist’s latest compositions, “Grotto” and “Harmattan,” get their deep red color from colorants formulated with gold. The rods are then curved using a kiln and molds before being cut into smaller sections. After sorting the tens of thousands of pieces by color and shape, Leib begins the process of arranging them in frames to form three-dimensional works.
Glass artist Shayna Leib like anyone, is deeply attracted to the seductive pull of decadent desserts. Unlike most however, Leib is unable to indulge. Her body reacts to several aspects of puffed pastries and chocolate mouses, causing her to have many severe dietary restrictions. It was this void that pulled her towards the desire to work with the unattainable, to recreate the objects she couldn’t eat.
“This body of work started as a therapeutic exercise in deconstruction and a re-training of the mind to look at dessert as form rather than food,” says Leib in an artist statement about her series Patisserie. “It soon became a technical riddle, and I became a food taxidermist of french pastries.”
To create the glossy sculptures she combines elements of porcelain and glass, utilizing nearly every technique for both to achieve the hyperrealistic quality of each faux dessert. Like a typical French pastry would be rolled, glazed, baked, and trimmed, Leib hot-sculpts, fuses, casts, grinds, throws, and even pipes with a theme-appropriate pastry tube.