THIS WEEK’S MUSE
KAREN LAMONTE, SCULPTOR
“Holy mackerel, this is the studio? That’s the place I wanted to be!”
Karen LaMonte is an American sculptor, living and working in Prague. She works with a variety of materials but is perhaps best known for her life-size sculptures in cast glass.
Working in glass was not on LaMonte’s radar as a fine arts undergraduate, but the “holy mackerel” moment made glass a part of her artistic future. It happened during a visit to a glass art studio with a friend. The environment was so different from her painting studio – a room filled with a material in different stages of melting, transformation, or organic change; part alchemy, part poetry, part beautiful, blossoming art.
And at the heart of the studio was the catalyst to the magic – fire. The beating heart and essential tool of all glass art is the central furnace – heat breathing life, form, and movement into the glass, turning it from an inert solid into anything imaginable. “The sound, the light, the heat, and then this material,” said LaMonte. “I loved the fact that the material moved.” LaMonte switched to studying glass art.
After college she worked at the Experimental Glass Workshop in New York City, then a studio scholarship in Prague provided the stimulus to create her first major work, a life-sized glass dress called Vestige. It took over a year to complete and such was her vision and ambition; new studio techniques had to be developed to realize the work.
LaMonte’s glass dresses exist in an extraordinary world of translucent delicacy; a sartorial lens that allows her to explore the fragility of the human condition. They are occupied with the emotional presence of the absent wearer, the glass filling and shaping the garment en fleur. The tension created by this ‘present absence’ generates a tangible energy within the viewer, wjo is both familiar with the item, but caught unaware by its power. “Clothing both protects and projects, says LaMonte. “It is an armor and costume, plumage and camouflage.”
The result creates a tranquil memento mori, a beautiful reminder of our human transience. “Because beauty is ephemeral,” LaMonte said, “It is exquisitely somber…an acknowledgment of the self’s limits. For me, to represent it is to take comfort in the essential and eternal.”
These highly charged works embody LaMonte’s artistic challenge to historic conceptions of the female nude. Her exploration of cultural ideals of beauty, gender, and identity, through a material that both embodies and contradicts tradition, has set a new critical and artistic standard in sculpture.
“For me, the heart of the sublime is a sense of longing and desire. Unlike beauty, which we can control, the sublime defines a boundary between what we understand and that which lies beyond our power of reason. We are not in control of sublime experiences.”
HAPPENING
Four Wednesdays, from September 6, 4–6:30pm
FALL PLEIN AIRE PAINTING
with Susan Overstreet
Create outdoors on the beautiful streets of Cape Cod.
Member: $140, Non-member: $160
Thursday, October 12, 6–9pm
ARTISTS & COLLECTORS DINNER
This unique experience is set around an exclusive evening at the Cultural Center, designed to cultivate relationships between artists, patrons, and curators.
Twenty-five selected artists will join the Director of the Center at the Artist & Collectors Dinner and connect with 50 art collectors. The aim is trifold – to match wonderfully creative artists with collectors while being paid for their work upfront, have a curated collection shown in the Saben Board Room Gallery and Art Library, and raise funds to support the vital work of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod.