Friday, March 19, 2010

Friendly Fire and Chad Cully



Opening Final Friday, March 26th, is Friendly Fire. This exhibition features new sculptural glass work by local artist and educator Chad Cully.
Friendly Fire continues through May 22nd, with regular gallery hours Tuesday- Saturday: 11-3 for the run of the show. 1305 Gallery will host a catered reception with the artist and his work for the opening, March 26th, from 6-11 pm, and then again on April 30th from 6-11 pm.



Friendly Fire:
Not unlike much of society, Chad Cully has been observing the recent cultural obsession with our impending doom as a civilization. Between fears of global warming, more natural disasters, 2012's hearkening, and the ever lurking alien attack, people have been corralled into a frenzy awaiting 'the end of the world.'

Nestled somewhere between apocalyptic satire and a childlike interpretation of our ultimate demise sits Cully's new body of work. In Friendly Fire the artist furnace works, sculpts, blows, and fuses soda lime glass into aliens, bunnies, rocket ships, a UFO, and even a mutant/robotic penguin and pig. They are characters in a humorous interpretation of our last days on earth.
One beautifully sculpted glass alien is both evil and quirky in his posture, for he seeks to kill the cute vessel-like bunnies who are ultimately representations of the innocent.
Massive glass rocket ships with fused representations of earthly things attached to their hulls are the arks which will carry the bunnies and bits of life and culture off to space to find a new home. One is perched on a welded steel base which helps the piece to so perfectly remind us of the cartoonish representations of rockets from our childhood.
Robotic oracles and a mutant pig and penguin seem to hover on the edge of the sinister, but they must somehow be trusted to free the bunnies from being devoured by the aliens!

Come act out the apocalypse with these beautifully intriguing and insanely well made glass characters and invent your own ending to the story!

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