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Tender Glass

Amy Hauft and Carol Mavor

November 1st - November 3rd, 2017

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Still image from Amy Hauft, Looping animation of ocean waves from underwater, diving in tropics, 2017. Video loop, clip length: 20 seconds. © Arseniy Gutov, 2017.

Project Details

“Texas Flood Disaster: Harvey Has Unloaded 9 Trillion Gallons of Rain. If that water were collected into a cube next to Houston’s downtown, it would cover an area of about four square miles and be two miles tall…The 9 trillion gallons of water dispensed so far is enough to fill the entire Great Salt Lake in Salt Lake City — twice! It would take nine days straight for the Mississippi River to drain into Houston and equal the amount of water already there.”

—Matthew Cappucci, noon, 9/27/2017, The Washington Post

Fluent~Collaborative & testsite are pleased to present Tender Glass, an art installation by Amy Hauft. Hauft produces architectural-scale installations in which landscape seems to occur in indoor settings. Each artwork is an intersection of the viewer’s haptic and cognitive experiences. Initially, one’s physical experience takes precedence; eventually, an anomalous logic challenges and concentrates that physical memory.

For Tender Glass, Hauft makes palpable a volumetric experience of water. In a disastrous coincidence, Hurricane Harvey makes that ambition dreadfully poignant.

Hauft creates site interventions that intensify the self-consciousness of the viewer as an entity both occupying and moving through a space. She creates circumstances that elicit a viewer’s self-conscious presence. For Tender Glass, she takes the physical parameters of the gallery’s living room as an opportunity for viewers to animistically apprehend the space’s volume. Through modest interventions of a video projection, curtains and a material sleight of hand with the room’s furniture, Hauft makes visceral the proportions and physicality of the space.

On Wednesday, November 1st, Hauft will be joined by cultural theorist and art historian, Carol Mavor, to discuss the material affect of her interventions. Mavor is known for books in which she takes literary and political risks to palpably divine the content of artworks. For this occasion, Mavor has written a fairy tale set within the circumstance of Hauft’s Tender Glass imagery. Designed by Jesse Cline, a printed edition of the story will be available.

Amy Hauft has exhibited her large-scale architectural installations in museums and galleries worldwide, including at the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, PS1 Museum (all NYC), the International Artists Museum (Poland) and The American Academy in Rome (Italy), and with an upcoming project at Mass MoCA. She is the recipient of significant grants including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, PEW Foundation Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, the Howard Foundation Fellowship and the NYC Public Art Fund. She has been awarded residencies abroad including the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Umbria, Italy and the International Artists Residency Fellowship in Lodz, Poland.

Hauft taught for 14 years at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, then, for 8 years chaired the renowned Sculpture Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2012 she moved her studio to Austin, Texas and was named the Leslie Waggener Professor in Sculpture in The University of Texas’ Department of Art and Art History.

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester, England. As a writer who takes creative risks in form (literary and experimental) and political risks in content (sexuality, racial hatred, child-loving and the maternal), she has published widely on photography, cinema, color and childhood. All her books, including Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour (Reaktion, 2013), are richly illustrated with an eye on design. Her most recent monograph, Aurelia: Art and Literature through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale (Reaktion, 2017) is perhaps the most beautiful of Mavor’s publications: indeed, it is an ‘artist’s book’.

[Mavor] is a kissing cousin of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Susan Stewart, in her attention to touch and affect, in her sensitivity to her own emotions and sense perceptions in her apprehension of art. So, for an art historian in particular, her work is singular, unusually labile, sensuous, associative, and almost disturbingly intense.
—Emma Wilson, Critical Quarterly