Photos Eva I leyd, courtesy of I feller Gallery.
Opposite:
Right:
A fte r You’re Cone,
W h a tn o t I I ,
2010,
2008 2009, a room-size
84 x 44 x 34 in., and
installation at
R ISD
W h a tn o t
1
,
2010,
Museum of Art, which
detail, 84 x 44 x 28 in.,
included a glass settee
both glass and wood,
and glass wallpaper.
Lipman created some
of the works with
students in
r i s d ’s
glass department.
The suggestive mysteries embedded in works like
the
IVhatnots
and
After You’re Gone
bring the traditional
vanitas metaphors of the still life, with its intimations
of mortality, into Sharply personal relief.
boldly across the room; the glistening mountain of food, drink
and luxurious vessels, still enticing, is rapidly decaying into chaos.
Everyone’s face is flushed, and the mood could turn on a dime.
How many glasses will crash to the floor before the party loses its
luster? How much is too much?
Lipman’s banquet and tea tables embody a sophisticated and
incisive critique. Yet their direct references to still life painting,
historical vessels and furnishings allow us to maintain a safe dis-
tance. Her conceptually rich photographs create an additional lay-
er of remove, recording compositions in glass that no longer exist:
Lipman destroys or recycles them. Just as managing things is inti-
mately linked to managing our lives and relationships, Lipman’s
intense engagement with objects is gradually becoming more per-
sonal. Her most current work cuts closer to the bone. For
Bride
and
the
Whatnots,
2010, she uses the Victorian étagère and dessert stand
to shift into a more familiar frame of reference. The objects that
make up
Bride,
assembled in five tiers on a ten-foot-high stand,
descend with painful inevitability from order to chaos, poignantly
expressing our desire for perfection and control, whether the con-
text is a wedding, a household, or a marriage itself.
The paired
Whatnots
are filled with an eccentric array of souve-
nirs from her own home, each cast in somber black glass that
obscures their original nature. Their full meaning, as objects of
sentiment, is inaccessible to us, embedded in Lipman’s memories.
Recent scholarship locates narrative—moral and political—as well
as autobiography in the still life tradition, and Lipman, who knows
its history intimately, increasingly finds herself enmeshed in her
work. In her mind the
Whatnots
relate to her twin daughters, now
just over a year old, an identification she feels deeply but still finds
challenging to articulate. She describes her sense of dread when
a glass napkin monogrammed with her initials—a sort of signature
for
Bancketje—
cracked, and marvels at the strange coincidence of
her twins’ difficult birth with a crack that formed in her audacious
conjoined chairs for
After You’re Gone,
2008-2009, an installation
at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art. These sug-
gestive mysteries bring the traditional vanitas metaphors of the still
life, with its intimations of mortality, into sharply personal relief.
Lipman’s next project is a collaboration with her close friend
Swedish artist Ingalena Klenell, for the Museum of Glass in
Tacoma.
Glimmering Gone
marries an assemblage of fractured,
unattainable “objects of desire” with light projections and a
curtain of glass elements inspired by the 19th-century landscape
painter Abby Williams Hill. It’s a leap into the unknown for
both Lipman and Klenell, technically and conceptually. Much
like her perilously laid tables, Lipman has a gift for keeping her
balance while pushing her limits.
Jody Clowes, a curator and writer, directs the Design Gallery at the
University o f IVisconsin-Madison.
+
bethlipman.com
hellergalleiy.com
june/julyio american craft 045
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