from the KEY WEST ART & HISTORICAL SOCIETY 281 FRONT STREET, KEY WEST, FL 33040 295-6616 Fax: 295-6649
Attention: News editors, news directors, features editors and programming directors. Please use the following item as a news story, public service announcement or community event. Pix available. For immediate release, Jan. 6, 2005
For Key West sculptor Vera Vasek, the turning point in her life as a fine artist probably came about 18 years ago as she stood on an isolated sand bar in Tampa Bay. There, she sensed the intersection and interaction of sand, sea and sky. There, the natural forces- wind, current, temperature fluctuations, time, and planetary gravitational fields all came together. "It was there where I decided where I would begin," she said. On Jan. 20, a major exhibition of her work, entitled Tidal Reliefs opens in the Key West Museum of Art & History at the Custom House. Included are a number of current works plus a sampling of earlier sculptures and a careful viewer will be able to trace her esthetic environmental themes through a variety of media from plaster impressions of Keys beach topography to colored glass sculptures that look as if they could be chunk of the ocean made solid and permanent. "To me each piece I construct is a window to the natural world, gateway into something that is totally different," she says. "It begins in nature and as an artist I abstract it and present it to the world as something concrete and three-dimensional." "Sometimes I am overcome by the beauty and terror of it allūthe power that's represented by the effects of the sea on the land, at that particular interface between sea and sand." Since the early 1990s Vasek has worked with imagery produced in the sand flats such as those found at Snipe Point and at Woman and Dink Keys. "I've focused on how water, coerced by the physical world, can influence perception. I have used a wide variety of materials to convey this harvested imagery to fixed form: Cast paper, plaster, resins, cast stone, marble and, finally, glass." The pieces in this exhibition are plaster reliefs of tidal flats made on site and sculptures of the ocean in translucent glass. Like a painter who preserves a scene of a moment of light and time on canvas, Vasek captures a few of the beautiful but ephemeral creations of nature, the limitless patterns left by a receding tide (and perhaps an occasional bird) in the sand, the shadows of passing clouds, an instant of the first light of day on the sea or the land and the power of a translucent wave colored blue green by the sun and sky. But, like the work or any important artist, Vasek's creations do more than mimic nature. They also derive their meaning by probing human consciousness. In the words of Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent art curator, essayist and critic: "Vasek is profoundly interested in the ways time and memory shapes things, literally and metaphorically. She explores and balances surface phenomenon with what lies beneath and couples positive and negative images as part of a more complex and complete resolution. The Florida Keys have been Vasek's constant muse and collaborator, her work taken, in an actual sense, from this, her chosen domain. Ultimately, her practice is a deeply felt, ongoing homage to the Keys' abundant nature, its sultry, bleached allure." Trained in classic sculpture techniques with a fine arts degree from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, Vasek's early work was in mold making and bronze casting of the human form. A fine example can be found in the garden at the East Martello Museum. Vasek got additional technical training at MJM studios and at an architectural restoration company in the New York area. After her epiphany on the gulf coast, Vasek came to Key West in 1988 and has been working out of her studio on Stock Island. She has exhibited many times in Key West galleries and museums, including a one-person exhibition in 1988 at the East Martello, and annually in the Art In The Park Key West exhibitions at Fort Zachary Taylor. Last May Vasek was picked as artist in-residence at The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, May 2004, Corning, New York. Commenting about her work Vasek said: "I am not trying to fit a particular style, agenda or some art critic's perception of what things should be," she said. "But I would hope people might start to get what I get from working with these elements. If they can get more and move onto a more conceptual level, that's wonderful." The exhibition, part of the Key West Art & Historical Society's Artists-In Season series, runs though Feb. 25. It will open with an artist's reception Jan. 20 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Custom House with hors d'oeuvres donated by Michaels Restaurant. Following the reception attendees who show their invitation or KWAHS membership cards at Antonia's, Michaels, Nicola Seafood or Flagler's will have 15 percent of their restaurant bill donated to the Society's education programs.
-30-
|
| Molten Glass Sculpture by Vera Vasek, 2004 |
|
| Plaster and aluminum pipe by Vera Vasek |
|
| Sculptor Vera Vasek at work on beach in 1998, making a plaster relief |
|
| Molten Glass Sculpture by Vera Vasek, 2004 |