IF YOU GO
* What: "Abstracted Beauty," works by Algar Dole and Philip Laszlo * Where: River Gallery, 400 E. Second St., through April 30. * Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday. * Information: 265-5033, ext. 5, river-gallery.com * Artist website: www.atlantaartglass.com Also featured Philip Laszlo is a Finnish photographer born in Helsinki to a French mother and Hungarian father. The images on display in "Abstracted Beauty" are abstracted compositions of landfills that "revitalize and beautifies that which is cast off," according to a press release.
Despite his matter-of-fact tone, the language Algar Dole uses to describe glass blowing makes his life's work sound less like crafting surreal, translucent vessels than composing three-dimensional poetry in a magma-hot furnace.
"People are just simply amazed at the kinds of colors and lines that you can get with glass," he says. "To them, it's a solid, but it's not really a solid; it's actually a liquid ... frozen in time at the temperature that we normally look at it."
"Unfreezing" the soda-lime glass with which he works involves heating it on a hollow pipe in a kiln until it's more than 2,000 degrees -- just a few millimeters of mercury shy of the temperature at which cast iron begins to ooze and flow.
By this point, the glass is a white-hot, glowing bud with a consistency Dole likens to pulled taffy or honey. Blowing through the pipe helps the bubble to expand, at which point it can be manipulated -- stretched and pinched with tools -- into surreal shapes that later harden.
An Algar Dole work of art"[The glass] is much more alive," the 67-year-old describes.
A Virginia-born, Georgia-based artist, Dole began manipulating glass decades ago after studying two-dimensional media at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and Indiana University.
Through the end of April, several of his pieces will be on display and for sale at River Gallery, alongside photographs by Finnish photographer Philip Laszlo, as part of "Abstracted Beauty," an exhibit highlighting aesthetically appealing works derived from unexpected places.
Dole's introduction to manipulating glass was through practicing fusing and slumping, a technique in which the artist cuts individual pieces of glass to fit a design, heats them, then forms and bonds them together around a mold.
His introduction to glass blowing came during a trip from his home in Broadway, Va., to the headquarters of Blenko Glass Co. in Milton, W.V., located about halfway between Charleston and Huntington. He later attended a workshop at New York City's Experimental Glass Workshop in Brooklyn.
Dole says he appreciated the physicality of blowing, which requires both constant vigilance and a deft hand but is a more engaging process than fusing.
"The end results certainly were more interesting," he says. "You had to work with a liquid element ... so you had to ... keep moving. That was more exciting than just cutting out flat pieces of glass and heating them up."
At his shop in Silver Creek, Ga., a community just south of Rome, Dole creates objects of otherworldly, nebulous, organic beauty. Some ripple and fold in on themselves like flower petals, others have stretched curves of almost-Seussian proportions. The designs range from subtle geometric patterns to translucent faux-botanicals to riotous, abstract swirls like melting peacock feathers.
Hopefully, Dole says, his work reveals to its viewers the wealth of potential locked away in an otherwise mundane material.
"We experiment from time to time in order to come up with some sort of new image or a product," Dole says. "You get surprised sometimes; there are some happy accidents.
"[Glass blowing] really brings something alive to people that they would never usually see."
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.