CURIOUS : DAVID DOWLER + JACKIE PANCARI
DAVID DOWLER
David Dowler began his professional life as a designer-silversmith for Samuel Kirk & Sons, spent much of his career as innovative, world-renowned sculptor and designer for Steuben Glass, and is now working primarily in steel in his Corning, New York studio. The son and grandson of architects and a distant relative of the late poet Marianne Moore (he owns and has read all her books), Dowler reflects his heritage as well as his own abundant gifts and depth of experience through the shapes, surfaces, and symbols in his sculptures.
Creating one-of-a-kind works in steel, because he finds it “a very expressive material.” He is drawn to the metal’s strength, power and seemingly limitless possibilities of color and texture, as well as form. He focuses on making objects with meaning that people can have in their homes, sized to sit on a table and invite inspection and introspection. His subjects are the stuff of ordinary life, largely geometric structures. “It is a welcome challenge to work with such tough material. An artist must be strong enough to overcome the metal’s natural resistance to change.” says Dowler. “Even the weight of it is fascinating.” Dowler continues.
As for the physical process, Dowler collects and incorporates some found objects but finds plenty of character in new metal that he cuts welds and fabricates by himself without assistants in his Corning studio. If the work becomes too unwieldy he has a ten year working relationship with a very capable metal worker in Elmira NY. This direct contact with the material has formed a bond between material and artist that though challenging is central to Dowler's work.
Dowler’s works have been exhibited in museums worldwide and are in the permanent collections of many, from the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris to the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, Japan.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
“I make sculpture about things. Part maquette and part finished piece, my sculpture is a distillation and interpretation of contemporary events with tinges of romance, distress, and failure. By making my work evocative and personal, I hope to influence the exchange between people and objects—things—their possessions. My new work employs color and construction detail to underscore the illusory qualities of a world in which they are a part.”
JACKIE PANCARI (1961-2021)
Jackie Pancari loved exploring the ways that glass and light interact. She thought of her studio as “a laboratory where curiosity and imagination lead to experimentation and discovery.”
Jackie Pancari, a glass artist from Alfred, NY, earned her MFA in Glass/Sculpture from the Alfred University School of Art and Design in 1996. She received her BFA in Glass/Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She exhibited her work across the US at galleries and museums, such as the Morgan Contemporary Glass Gallery, Corning Museum of Glass, Museum of American Glass, and Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. She was an Artist in Residence at the Corning Museum of Glass and at Seto City Art Museum in Japan. Pancari was also a 2013 inductee in Rochester Institute of Technology’s Innovation Hall of Fame. Previously, she was an Artist in Residence and Visiting Artist at RIT.
Pancari was featured in Art in Craft Media 2015 at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, as well as Craft Art Western New York 2004 when she won the Sylvia Rosen Endowment Purchase Award.
Speaking about her work featured in Art in Craft Media 2017, Pancari explained, “This playful investigative work is inspired by 'Ah Ha' moments and discoveries while focusing on light, optics, and reflections. I’m most interested in the moment between confusion and understanding what one is looking at. Curiosity, beauty, questioning, science, internal focus and the quiet confusion one has while studying the pieces are what drive the decision-making in creating each piece. The viewer is meant to walk around, hover over, and engage the piece, so that they are in control of what they are seeing. The work then becomes very kinetic.”
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
My work represents a series of discoveries made while working with the properties of glass and light. Some of the properties of glass are its hot fluid qualities, its refractive qualities, its magnification and reductive properties. I think of my studio as a laboratory where curiosity and imagination lead to experimentation and discovery. Eventually, this yields glass forms that reflect the elemental and physical properties of glass that have always inspired me.
Glass speaks clearly about light. It seems so simple yet its ability to assume an infinite number of forms and to evoke just as many feelings, render it complex. Creating shapes that exude a quiet beauty, simplicity and sensuality represents the most basic foundation of my work; the juxtaposition of those shapes reveals relationships that are, in turn, basic to a more complex whole.
In the end, my greatest hope is that those who see my work walk away with a sense of wonder, mystery and the same inquisitiveness that I experienced in its creation.