Crystal Logic

Imagine you are a beam of light. If you originated in the sun, you have already traveled some 93 million miles on your journey towards Earth. You then pass through an interruption called the atmosphere and careen and reflect around the surface of the planet. You will undoubtedly pass through one last windowpane before you enter a sculpture made of glass of such optical purity that it is 99.8% transparent.

Now you belong to Christopher Ries. Whether you've journeyed millions of miles or just a few feet from a nearby light source, he's going to bend, shape, ricochet, redirect, amplify, interrupt, mirror, and refract you. Ries will create contexts that will massage your wavelengths and make you explode in unexpected chroma. Even though you're traveling 186,000 miles per second, it will appear to you that the artist is faster, that he cunningly anticipates your every move as he sets up scenarios to maximize aspects of your photic being. It's going to seem as if at one moment he's accelerating you out of the piece like some hyper-slingshot, sending you on your merry way back into the cosmos; at the next moment he's locking you within the piece, causing you to bound and rebound in an unending chase after yourself, perhaps terminating your journey in a little bit of ground crystal. Either way, this is an art of such suggestiveness and finesse, of such ceaseless transition and surprise, that it constitutes one of the most intriguing exercises in the poetics of optics anywhere in contemporary art.

Christopher Ries does a lot of things, and among them is to create pleasingly crisp, sleek, and tapered sculptures with shapes that would be compelling and interesting no matter what their medium. But these shapes, we immediately discern, are actually stupendously crafted and scintillating platforms for cosmic bits of photo-aesthetic theater. When intersected with light, one of the most fundamental elements of the universe, Ries's shapes will spring into action. What was a form, a three-dimensional object, now revs up in crystalline proliferation, both presenting two-dimensional facets and-in its ceaseless changing as we move about it-offering an aperture into a fourth dimensional world as well. Much sculpture is plurifacial: the artist carefully considers the presentation of the multiple profiles and shapes it will exhibit as we move about it. The sculpture of Christopher Ries, however, achieves an omnifacial state: it presents us with an aperture into infinity, with an exterior designed and articulated to set in motion an interior of truly endless visual incident. (It is a nicety in essays such as this to note that photography cannot ever capture the essence of sculpture, that photography's flattening effect turns the reality of three-dimensionality into fiction. This elusiveness cannot be truer than in the case of Christopher Ries. The photographs accompanying this catalog can provide no more than snippets in a chain of reception, tantalizing fragments that only hint at an experience that must happen in actual time amidst these sculptures.)

It is, of course, a particular honor for Christopher Ries to achieve this exhibition in the city that he called home for so many years. He was born and raised in the country, just a few miles west of Columbus, near the confluence of the Darby creeks. An early interest in art led Ries to nearby Ohio State University where,and this is fairly consistent with artists who end up specializing in glass,he began by concentrating on ceramics. His interest in glass soon followed. Even while an undergraduate, he was instrumental in building a glass hot shop at OSU, and he helped teach glassblowing there before receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He subsequently had the opportunity to study for his Master's degree with the highly respected artist Harvey Littleton, at the University of Wisconsin.

Harvey Littleton had played a central role as one of the founders of the modern studio glass movement in the United States. Beginning with his workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1962, Littleton and his colleague Dominick Labino championed the possibilities for small furnace design that would liberate hot glassworking from large commercial firms and bring it to the independence of an artist's studio. Suddenly glass could become less a corporate product, less tied to the profit-driven artisanry of a large firm, and more idiosyncratic, personal, and responsive to the will of an individual artist. Ries's years with Littleton did have some aspects of an apprenticeship about them, but it was not so much a style that Harvey Littleton taught Christopher Ries as it was an attitude, the conviction that glass would be a modern material for sculpture of the highest rank. Ries became not just Littleton's student but his studio assistant, and Ries worked side by side with Littleton on many of the latter's pieces. While Littleton concentrated on the hot glasswork, among the tasks he assigned to Ries was to fabricate the bases for the final sculptures. Ries had grown fully conversant with all aspects of hot glasswork, but he was fascinated by this opportunity to concentrate on cold glass, to treat blocks of glass as volumetric elements that could transmit light or color. As he cut, ground, and polished these bases, Ries grew very attentive to the purity-or more often than not, the relative impurity-of the glass he was using. He noticed how tiny imperfections imbedded in the block would become amplified and distorted, and he realized how soupy and muddy most of the glass that we assume to be transparent actually is. (Standard window glass, for example, only successfully transmits about 70 percent of the light that enters it; we tend not to notice this effect because of the thinness of most windowpanes.)

While attending the University of Wisconsin, Ries helped to build and maintain a studio in nearby Mineral Point, Wisconsin, and he spent two summers working both hot and cold glass there, before moving back to Columbus. He continued his researches into the technology of glass fabrication, its chemistry, and its optical and physical properties, educating himself about the visual potentials of crystal. Seeking a purer form of glass for his investigations, Ries began communicating with commercial enterprises that manufactured glass for scientific and technological purposes. One such firm, Schott Glass Technologies Inc., in Duryea, Pennsylvania (near Scranton/Wilkes-Barre), would change his life.

Schott is an international firm with sales to industry and government currently exceeding $2 billion. As their Web site puts it, Schott specializes in "a commitment to the enhancement of glass and glass ceramics to meet the needs of advancing technology." Schott glass was used in the lenses of the cameras the astronauts took to the moon, and Schott's current work in fused silica and laser glass may hold a key to finding cleaner and cheaper sources of energy. Much of Schott's research would remain beyond Ries's ken, but he responded avidly to the search for absolute clarity in the glass that Schott produced, seeing in it a raw material from which he could cajole optical effects of the most exciting sort.

Schott, of course, had little experience in meeting the needs of an individual creative artist. When Ries first contacted the firm in the late 1970s, the firm was cooperative enough to give and later sell him chunks of what was by far the purest glass he had ever seen. Ries's relationship with Schott has now lasted some twenty years. He began visiting the firm regularly in 1982, commuting from his home in Columbus, and he became artist-in-residence to Schott Glass Technologies in 1986, a position he continues to hold today. In 1992 he and his family moved to Pennsylvania. Ries is not an employee of Schott, but rather an ongoing guest, an autonomous agent with a studio on the premises of the firm. Ries developed a financial relationship with Schott that provides him with glass and access to their highly sophisticated tools and facilities in return for a certain percentage of the income generated by the sale of his art. This arrangement allows him to work on a scale he could never realize otherwise and to create pieces that can weigh several hundred pounds.

The relationship between Schott and Ries represents one of the most interesting, and symbiotic corporate/artistic intersections in the world today; art and commerce work here side by side, the artist receiving access to materials and machinery he could not afford on his own, the firm finding prestige in a cultural application of their technology they never anticipated. Even the financial relationship seems a model of its type, as the artist is not dependent on corporate largesse but is a professional partner in production and display.

Philosophically, this consensual return to the factory is an intriguing anomaly in the development of the modern studio glass movement. While Littleton's researches into small studio furnaces have provided a tremendous impetus to independent and isolated studio practice, the exodus from the glass factory has meant leaving a certain amount of technological expertise behind. What Christopher Ries (trained in that studio milieu) enjoys at Schott is a bit of the best of both worlds. Schott is certainly not a glassworks that creates domestic ware for sale; it is a laboratory at the cutting edge of crystal technology. There Ries speaks and interacts every day not with artists but with scientists and professionals who are seeking new horizons for glass, subjecting it to new applications in pursuit of new possibilities. The ethos Ries encounters there,the corporate penchant for logic, exactitude, crispness, and precision,-becomes part of the ethos of his own work, dovetailing perfectly with his own quest for a poetics of purity.

A work by Christopher Ries, especially the large-scale pieces on display in this exhibition, begins with the creation of a block of glass that exhibits state-of-the-art/industry homogeneity and clarity. The block will never solarize, never get dingy,-the purity of the material allows it to transmit 99.8% of the light. The block can often weigh more than 3,000 pounds, and it can take several months in an annealing chamber to cool from its molten state to room temperature, until it is stable. Then Ries subjects that block to an incredible and complex sequence of sawing, grinding, cutting, carving, sanding, and polishing, very often in several repeated stages and levels. This highly skilled assault on the block can take him and his assistants a year or more to complete. The slightest error,-a scratch, a chip, a flaw discovered within the glass, an improperly ground edge,renders the piece useless, and the artist does have to contend with a certain percentage of false starts. This part of the process is all coldworking; once the glass is cast as a block, heat plays no subsequent role in the creation of these sculptures.

But it is not technology, however interesting and complex, that makes Christopher Ries a sculptor of note-it is what he does with and through that technology. He is a conjurer, a releaser, and a seeker endlessly fascinated and moved by the optical mystery of light. He wants to caress it, turn it this way and that, surprise it, try to bend it to his will, and set it in an engagement with itself that will allow us to apprehend the essence of its metamorphic being. Glass and light,that's all Christopher Ries uses. He tends to avoid color, laminate, and other materials, reducing his components to their essential elements and then showing how endless is their interplay. Skill by skill, effect by effect, he has uncovered how a sliver here, a triangulation there, a beveled edge at that point, a swelling of material over here, a long surface plane on this side, an abrupt incision at that base, a bit of engraving at that spot, now concave, now convex, will provide the intensified prismatic aperture that allows his highly directed magic to happen. Ries is a chessmaster who through long and diligent practice has trained himself to think several moves ahead; his mind senses what light might do next and how glass can be sculpted to permit or frustrate its procedure;how form can be tied to function. But he knows simultaneously that light can be infinite in its possibilities, that every angle of incidence, secondary light source, change of environment, time of day, even a nearby wall and the viewer's height and shadow, can re-spin the agenda into something new, something never seen before. Each piece by Ries exists solely for the immediate viewer, who sees something unique, different from what the next person will experience, as he or she circles about the sculpture while it performs its intimate dance for that viewer alone. The contour of the piece itself never changes, while the light intersecting it will change, as will the position of the viewer's eyes and mind, as he or she circumnavigates this always transmutative object.

A payoff for all this creative effort is sometimes a sudden glimpse of a skillfully articulated shape, a crystalline rendition of a vase, flower, bird, angel, or body, an eerie and transitory image that will disappear as soon as the viewer moves an inch or two away. There is, of course, no vase or flower or bird, but a bit of ground or contoured glass that immediately and momentarily calls up the image-fully coalesced. The image is evanescent and fragile, this little ode to form, a kind of spirit called out of geometry, a pulsation frozen within the solidity of glass. You look in vain across the surface of the piece to find that shape somehow etched or secreted, probably realizing that it will never be there, that what you find in that one moment of cohesion is itself a compilation of fragments, constructed out of reflections and refractions that are dazzlingly mirrored about.

Often, too, Ries gives us pure abstraction, a piling-up of angles, lines, curves, and arcs that makes the viewer feel he or she is caught in a Lyonel Feininger painting with no way out. Or we could think of these more abstract pieces in relation to gem working, to the jeweler's search for a dizzying cacophony of faceting. But while a jeweler is usually satisfied with the proliferation of facets in pursuit of surfeit, that way is never Ries's. His work is not about how many bits of incident he can create in the pieces, but which of those bits are right and judicious enough to further his ideas. At times he does want to multiply light in an intense fit of velocity. More often, however, he will choose to vary its rhythms to display the range of possibilities that occur when light intersects with carefully prepared volumes of glass.

If no light falls upon a sculpture by Christopher Ries, does it achieve the status of art? This question is more than one of those conundrums such as the one about the tree-falling-in-the-forest. Art always requires light to render it visible. But the sculptures of Christopher Ries are not merely illuminated by light, they are set into kinetic motion by it, and they begin to manifest themselves. Illumination can be both a thing and a state of being. In both cases, light-exterior and interior-is the metaphoric vehicle we use to describe illumination's journey. The sculptures of Christopher Ries allow light to reveal its architecture, logic, and steadfastness, while preserving its mystery and spirit. He gives us, in a way, a charged intersection of the psychology of light and of the person who receives it, providing a context for the sequential contemplation of aspects of the mechanics of life and light, two of the grandest creations in the universe.

by James Yood

James Yood teaches contemporary art theory and criticism at Northwestern University. He writes regularly for Artforum and GLASS magazines.