'Art of Glass 2' offers variety of glistening works

To sophisticated art fans, glass art can seem merely decorative. Just beautiful forms in candy-colored hues.

That's a shallow view. All forms carry meaning, as do all palettes. Dante Marioni's sleek, animated, glass-blown vessels on display this season at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia are a prime example.

Marioni's work evokes the sleek, modern designs that came out of the 1930s-'50s-era Venini glass factory in Murano, Italy, as well as some 20th century modern art, such as cartoony pop art and the buoyant, outlined shapes seen in work by surrealist Joan Miro.

Marioni is among the top American glassblowers. His show includes elegant forms displayed in twos and threes to create compositions with strong graphic interest. Each piece is pristine, amazingly so for its large scale (often several feet tall).

Besides Marioni's show, the art center has three other very strong glass exhibitions this summer, plus an introductory gallery on the history of glass and how it's made. Several videos add to the experience.

The shows are a highlight of "Art of Glass 2," an encore glass-art festival that includes exhibitions at most of the region's visual arts venues. At the center, one show includes dozens of sculptures by well-known glass artists collected by local patrons since the first "Art of Glass" was staged in 1999.

"Ashes to Ashes: Life and Death in Contemporary Glass" features 13 artists whose work delves into issues of mortality. Their work is the antithesis of Marioni's lighthearted formality.

The show was organized by curator Ragan Cole-Cunningham, the center's director of exhibitions and education, who was assisted by Katya Heller, co-owner of New York's Heller Gallery, which is famous for promoting adventurous sculpture that incorporates glass.

The "Ashes to Ashes" theme brings William Morris to mind, since he made astonishingly beautiful cinerary urns and canop ic jars topped with animal heads and figures. Morris retired from glassmaking, but Jane Rosen's work has a similar mythic or ritual feeling and, different from Morris, a looser rather than mimicking approach to suggesting nature.

Rosen's "Glass Buddhi Series" consists of six birds and a dog, their blown-glass figures elongated and hung on the wall, perhaps like a hunting day's kill. They resemble petrified artifacts with features blurred by time and the elements, and come off as poignant.

The best-known artist in the show is Kiki Smith, who often deals with grief related to the death of family members. Her "Little Sisters" consists of two stuffed, muslin-colored dresses, side by side on a bench, headless with glass hands protruding from sleeves.

Glass is cold and can be read as ghostly. One interpretation is that when Smith's sister Bebe died of AIDS in 1988, a part of her died, too. So that may be Kiki beside Bebe.

Judith Schaechter, with her "Exquisite Corpse," proves that stained glass can be used to make cutting-edge work with layers of meaning. Light is critical to stained glass; here, she extends that idea to the human body.

Mark Zirpel of Seattle also deals with bodies in an amusing, conceptual way. For example, he joined plumbing with clear blown-glass vessels in the shapes of a stomach and intestines to track the cycle of water through a person.

Ned Cantrell's "Silver Astronaut" is a tacky-funny sculpture of a big baby riding a silvery spaceship, reminiscent of the provocative Jeff Koons' monumental sculptures of balloon animals. Like Koons, he is paying utmost attention to craft toward a trite image, a combination many deem savvy in a pop revivalist manner.

Also noteworthy is Frida Fjellman's "Vulkaner," consisting of three clay volcanoes with blown-glass explosions emerging from the mouths; one is orange and lit from within. As is Tim Tate's clever "Map of the Human Heart," a complex arrangement under a glass dome: glass hands hold up a magnifier so we can spy a tiny video of dot after dot on a series of maps, surely denoting places around the world where the artist has left a little piece of his heart.

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com