Thomas Glassford

Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce Thomas Glassford’s opening “Between Earth and Sky.”   The exhibition opens with a cocktail reception with the artist from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, Saturday, January 19, 2008.  An illustrated catalog authored by Mary Coffey, Assistant Professor of Art History, Dartmouth College, accompanies the exhibition.

As Coffey observes, “Glassford’s work meditates on the distance between the body as sovereign ideal and as mortified and decaying reality. For his decorative formalism, whether linked to the high art discourse of mid-century modernism or the bad taste of kitsch design, is routinely compromised by an indexical materiality that grounds his objects in the social life of things. The “real presence” of these works can no more be eradicated than the traces of manure that anchor the flower.  Rather than reinforce the categorical imperatives of human idealism, Glassford’s works remain a “filthy sacrilege” within the history of pure form.  If we blush in their presence it is because they remind us, like Bataille’s flowers, that love is not the sanitized sentiment expressed with a bouquet of roses and a Hallmark card; it is a death drama “endlessly played out between earth and sky,” between a porous body and a specular image that never coincide, but, through object cathexis, seek coitus in an endless relay of misdirected desire.”