Matrix+Series+Amphora+Save

Date: 2006
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/2006/2006.17_1a.jpg&max=460 width="241" height="333" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=76249"]] || Title: **Matrix Series: "Amphora....Save"**

Artist: **Brent Kee Young** Born: Los Angeles, California 1946

Medium: Pyrex Dimensions: 49 x 17 3/4 in. (124.5 x 45.1 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase through the Richard T. Evans Fund

Accession: 2006.17 || //Matrix Series: "Amphora...Save"// culminates Young's 2005-06 sabbatical year from teaching. This piece and others in the //Matrix Series// are created with flame-worked Corning Pyrex rods fashioned to form an organic, interconnected structure. The result creates an intricately layered glass web. The idea came from the root structure of a tree and Cleveland's industrial landscape, Young said. His year of travel, research, and hard work in the studio provided a fresh perspective to create this complex, time-consuming work.
 * About the Artwork (official text): **

Born in 1946 in Los Angeles, CA. MFA, State University of New York, College of Ceramics at Alfred University, 1973. Taught at Aichi University of Education, 1990-1992. Currently lives in Cleveland, OH.
 * Biographical Information: **

Selected exhibitions: The Glass Gallery (Maryland 1987), Towata Gallery of Fine Art (Alton, Il 1987), "Personal Visions" Great American Gallery (Atlanta, GA 1986), "Glass in Japan 1987" (Tokyo 1987). Major collections: American Glass Museum (Millville, NJ) Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, OH), Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY), Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (Sapporo, Japan).

"What is important is not seemingly there..." "My work speaks of many things: of a respect and reverence for things natural, of ambiguity in space, form, volume, time, and images that are there and not there. It speaks of the concept of evidence: man's marks, nature's marks, their relation, together and apart." -Brent Kee Young.

Young’s work raises a delightfully oddball question: What would happen if you could make objects in glass that look like they consist entirely of cracks, without the intervening solid material? Young's answer comes in the form of his //Matrix Series//.

Some of his sculptural creations are shaped like large bowls, tilting on conical bases; Amphora....Save looks like a vertical slab with a bottle shape floating in its interior. He has also used this process to create chairs, ladders, and vessels. Each is made of a delicate lattice of slender twigs of clear glass that, from a short distance, create a visual pattern like that visible in a piece of shattered safety glass. Miraculously, however, there's nothing but air between Young's lattices; the structures are entirely linear, with no solid mass.

It takes enormous discipline and the help of three assistants to create Young's complicated works. The ability to come up with the ideas behind the works is just as important.

Brent Kee Young was selected to be the head of glass at Aichi University of Education in Kariya, Japan. He was responsible for setting up a studio and teaching the first glass program in a national university in Japan. Young has carefully considered the ideas and influences of art in Japan, and compares them with those of China: In China, importance is placed on what you see; and in Japan, importance is placed on what you don’t see. He uses this ambiguity of perception in his work, particularly his Fossil Series. The objects depicted around the vessels do not actually exist; they are just an impression of what was once there.

Brent Kee Young’s innovative glass techniques beautifully express his conceptual thoughts and his object based designs. His unique and technically complex structures are displayed in major museum collections around the world. The delicate luminosity of this work is truly exquisite. Yet some of his greatest influence has occurred in universities. He headed the establishment of the first glass program in a national university in Japan and since 1973 he has been Professor and Chairman of the Glass Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. Brent Kee Young is one of the leading artists in his field.
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