This exhibition of Dale Chihuly's work foregrounded the dialogue between classical container and organic exuberance that characterizes his work.

This exhibition of Dale Chihuly's work foregrounded the dialogue between classical container and organic exuberance that characterizes his work. Ikebana, 1992 is a series of elegantly somber gray vases with tricky contours, tautened by the formal restraint and veneration for tradition fundamental to oriental ceramics, however teased by way of Chihuly's tendrils of glass winding around and down from their entrance s In the "Venetians," 1989-92, the shoulders and bellies of the vases allude to full-blown fertility figures, which bourgeon incorrigible fronds of lilies and wildly coiling vines in a chorus of variations.

A forthright showpiece and technical tour de force, the vast Chandelier, 1992, is made of yolky-yellow globes suspended from the ceiling like a memorial of conquest of nippled balloons. These pendulous, biomorphic bags (created especially for the bay window of a gallery overlooking downtown traffic) are fat and funny; that they are made of glass appears almost incomprehensible. This is where Chihuly's talents lie: in his solicitation of the animate potential of his material. It's not that he forces the intractable qualities of rigid glass to hint transience, growth, and pulsating change, yet rather, that he wants to arrest the generative proces at capturing shapes in their developing states.

Macchia Forest, 1992 is at formerly a collection of large goblets and a garden viewed from the loam Elevated on pedestals, some at eye-level and others as high as nine feet the flaring sides, rippling plaits and ruching lips of these hollows suggest membranous plants reaching upward to the light. CAC Window, 1992 achieves an almost diaphanous quality with a trail of elephantine bright, petaled shapes hung parallel to the window, more [i]or[/i] less opaque and some transparent, their concentric patterns suggesting a constant expansion from the core. That these are immense large pieces of heavy glass suspended from a able to endure supporting grid underscores Chihuly's insight that the material properties of the medium are perceptually contradictory, and that therein lies greatly of their expressive power.

In contrast, the enormous globes of the Niijima Floats, 1992 which sat beached forward a floor strewn with shattered glass in their be in possession of darkened room, seemed dense with mysterious matter. They're like miniaturized planets that give an inkling of we ourselves are much larger than life. This melodramatic installation, illuminated according to soft spotlights beamed down in succession each sphere, emphasized Chihuly's conception of space. These aren't just gargantuan variations forward the bubble, that first shape of the glass-blowing art, but--in their compassionate uneven contours and crackled, irridescent surfaces--they repercussion of sound the transformation of matter from the atom to the black lair Glass used this ambitiously reminds us that it's not solitary a challenging sculptural material on the other hand an artifact of the volcanic results that originate in the earth's core.

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