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Five Years: Bronze
and Glass Sculpture
The exhibition "Five Years" marks the artist Terry Slade's continuing experimentation with two sets of opposites: the fluid - yet implicitly solid - mediums of bronze and glass, and the figure versus the abstract. Slade was born in California and raised and educated in Nebraska. He was taught in Florida, Italy, and New York State; and it is apparent that the environments experienced in these diverse places has strongly influenced his work, which is persistently informed by the cycles of nature. Most of the works assembled here are constructed by creating bronze frames from cast branches, twigs, leaves, seed pods, and other natural elements, often found in the artist's garden. These bronze forms are either filled or receive cast or blown hot glass. thus the container is also the contained, the vessel is both receptor and transporter, and the two, in their sublime union, become the supporters, protectors, transmitters and promoters of life. In their final form, the two mediums meld. Bronze, made from nature, but metallic and seemingly resistant to life's natural flow, is reconstituted into an ever changing metaphorical form. Glass, emerging into life from sand and fire, is equally as hard yet through its magical process, transmits light and exudes life. thus the two amalgamate to memorialize nature. Slade notes that he has always been interested in these materials because they tend to acknowledge the passage of time in the record of their own making. In the pouring and hardening of bronze and its eternal presence, and in the slow oozing of glass through time, they symbolically represent the environment of humanity: life, growth, death. Thus the figurative elements remind the viewer of humanity's enduring and fragile qualities, while the abstract, amorphous shapes haunt us with their continuous morphology. Ultimately, the sculptures are intended to provoke a metaphysical contemplation of existence: of how humankind is connected to a larger planetary sequence, and of how humankind, life, and nature precariously straddle a vulnerable ecosystem dependent on the fragile guardianship of its inhabitants. -Fiona M. Dejardin, Associate Professor of Art
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