From 10 yards or so away, Karen LaMonte’s “Semi-Reclining Dress with Drapery”, on display at the North Carolina Museum of Art, looks exactly like the title suggests: it’s a dress in a seated, reclining pose, its ‘fabric’ rippling, the dress molded to the contours of a body that doesn’t exist. The dress sits alone, strangely held up even though there’s no human form inside. Or maybe there is….and we just can’t see it. That’s what I thought looking at it from afar: it’s meant to be the garment of a ghost or some otherworldly being that’s invisible to the naked eye. The ‘fabric’, being simultaneously white, clear, and slightly bluish, fits the ghostly impression it made on me. Approaching the piece, it came as a shock to learn that this ‘fabric’ is actually glass.
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Every fold and crease that you’d expect a dress in this position to have is there. The body it’s wrapped around can be ‘seen’, even though it’s nonexistent: the legs are there, the stomach, the breasts. I still feel like this is the dress of some sort of phantom, but now I’m also admiring the craftsmanship of the sculpture, the painstaking detail put into it. I’ve never seen glass manipulated to create such a complex form, and the form itself is haunting.
“Clothing,” LaMonte writes, “both protects and projects. It is armor and costume, plumage and camouflage.”
This is LaMonte’s goal with this and other similar glass sculptures: to explore how clothing is used to create an image desirable to the wearer. Why would someone wear a dress such as this? To project an air of elegance, and perhaps to throw up a wall of haughtiness that would keep unwanted intruders from approaching. If a beautiful woman wore such a gown in this day and age, and was comfortable in it, she’d seem wealthy, cultured, fashionable….and totally off-limits to the majority of the male population. This is the equivalent of a peacock showing its colors: beautiful, but kind of overwhelming.
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| The author, stoically posing by the sculpture. |
The position of the dress gives me pause, however. The way ‘she’ is reclined….it’s not exactly good posture. I imagine a bored woman, martini in hand, leaning back against a sofa or something, not bothering to hide her disgust at the monotony of her current situation. The party’s dull, and she wants to go home. Every minute that she’s subjected to this dullness is an affront to her person.
After learning a bit more about the artist’s thought process, the above paragraph is my flesh-and-blood (if this were an actual present-day woman) interpretation of the sculpture: beauty combined with arrogance. This juxtaposes with the ghostly interpretation I had upon first coming across the piece: some
centuries-dead noblewoman, clad in the dress she wore to the countless balls/parties she attended in life. I can imagine someone in contemporary times wearing this dress, but it really looks like it’s been pulled from the 18th century.
To compare LaMonte to something we’ve already studied, the most obvious route to look at marble sculptures. The “Aphrodite of Melos” (page 339, “Living with Art”) is a good example. Aphrodite is the ultimate “womanly” goddess, symbolizing pure beauty and love. Though LaMonte’s woman is invisible, her “womanliness” is still evident in the contours left by her body’s impression. The garment covering Aphrodite’s bottom half isn’t quite dress-like, but the way it responds to the person inside it is just as realistic as “Semi-Reclining Dress with Drapery”.
centuries-dead noblewoman, clad in the dress she wore to the countless balls/parties she attended in life. I can imagine someone in contemporary times wearing this dress, but it really looks like it’s been pulled from the 18th century.
To compare LaMonte to something we’ve already studied, the most obvious route to look at marble sculptures. The “Aphrodite of Melos” (page 339, “Living with Art”) is a good example. Aphrodite is the ultimate “womanly” goddess, symbolizing pure beauty and love. Though LaMonte’s woman is invisible, her “womanliness” is still evident in the contours left by her body’s impression. The garment covering Aphrodite’s bottom half isn’t quite dress-like, but the way it responds to the person inside it is just as realistic as “Semi-Reclining Dress with Drapery”.
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| "Aphrodite of Melos" |
The pose of St. Teresa in “St. Teresa in Ecstasy” is almost exactly the same as the one in “Semi-Reclining Dress with Drapery” (see this video, 32:08, for a side-by-side comparison between the two). LaMonte’s dress looks like a modern update to Bernini’s famous sculpture.
Another example, and also the most eerie, is on the preceding page in “Living with Art”. “Three Goddesses” is a marble sculpture of three women….three headless, armless women. At first glass, the interior of their dresses seem to be devoid of substance, just like LaMonte’s sculptures! With their arms and heads knocked off, it appears that time and destruction created something that anticipated LaMonte’s “invisible ladies”. Again, the full-body dresses on “Three Goddesses” are molded precisely.
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| "Three Goddesses" |
LaMonte recognizes that her modern-day sculptures echo the “pristine white sculptures from antiquity, headless, armless remnants of a ruinous journey through time”. A playful limerick she wrote gives us some insight:
There once was a statue in Rome.
She sat on her ass on a throne.
Two thousand years later,
a companion I made her,
so now she won’t sit all alone
She’s also stated that “nobility is a classical ideal….drapery articulates the human figure….folds of fabric rendered in marble speak of beauty and loss”.
LaMonte was able to put her work beside classic sculptures in an exhibit at the Chrysler Museum of Art titled “Art of Glass II: Contemporary Glass Among the Classics”, enabling viewers to compare and contrast this connection in person.
It’s hard to categorize LaMonte as being in this school of art, or that school of art. At the most basic level, this creation of hers is a glass sculpture. But her work has so many possible interpretations, and is so unique, that it’s hard to pigeonhole her. For example, in painting, one can say “that’s impressionist” or “that’s abstract expressionist”. What word or phrase can accurately describe LaMonte?
The creator has this to say: “I think my work defies every definition, and I hope it raises this question in everyone’s mind. For example at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, the curator chose to put my work in the collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting and sculpture, not to works made specifically of glass. I am the person people really do not know what to call and I think that is good.”
Nicholas Bell, curator of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, states something similar: “Art historical conversations too often focus on how styles, materials, and bodies of work can be isolated from one another. Sometimes it takes an individual like Karen LaMonte to illustrate that the artistic terrain is a little more interesting and a little more complicated. I think her work calls out for broader definitions of craft and fine art in this country.”
The video below is a lecture and Q&A given by LaMonte. It provides even greater detail about her glass dresses, along with other artistic endeavors she's completed, as well as upcoming projects. It's the one referenced in this project, and where I've gathered much of Karen's biographical info and the technical details of her construction process.
LaMonte’s life, and the trials that she went through to accomplish what she’d been told was an “impossibility”, are just as impressive as her glass sculptures. This stage of work began in 1999, when she traveled to the Czech Republic on a Fulbright Grant (an international exchange grant, allowing academics to travel and work/study in other countries), with the idea of creating a life-size dress out of glass. Why trade Prague for New York, her native city? The Czech Republic was renowned for its expertise in large-scale glass casting, so LaMonte naturally assumed it was the place to go if she wanted to put her ideas into concrete form.
While on the Fulbright program, she studied at the Applied Arts Academy, and spent her time at a glass casting factory outside the city trying to create her elusive first dress. Although the factory wasn’t used to creating thing such finely-detailed, after one year of work, LaMonte had “Vestige”, the first in what would become a series of life-size dresses absent of actual bodily from.
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| Karen LaMonte with "Vestige". |
The process that LaMonte developed to make these pieces was original; a lot of trial and error was required to come up with a way to achieve such a difficult finished product. The first step in this process is to take a plaster mold of the human body using a live person. Next, the mold is covered in a plastic, and that plastic is then brushed with molten wax. Once the figure is complete, the task of finding a suitable garment for it begins.
After the mold is appropriately clothed, LaMonte uses hairspray to stiffen the fabric, which is then covered in wax. This is then covered in yet another mold, this time of plaster/silica (see minute 11:17 of video for the 500 pound block that remains, with the dress and body in the middle). But how would you actually get into the interior of the block and remove the wax? Channeling MacGuyver, LaMonte used pressure cookers with hoses attached and blew steam into the block, melting the wax, and completing the lost-wax process.
So now she’s got her molds. Throwing them into ovens, glass is melted over the surface. What follows is what LaMonte calls her least favorite stage: the cooling. It takes an excruciatingly long 80 days for the glass to set. As if that wasn’t painful enough, she has no idea how the finished product will look. The success rate is “sometimes” 50%, which means more than three months have been lost creating something that turns out to be a failure.
But if failure is avoided, the accomplishment is obviously thrilling. The sections are assembled, and voila, a cast glass dress. Before learning about this process, I thought that one mold was made and covered with glass, but either the technology doesn’t exist to do it this way, or making several pieces and then connecting them is easier. The piece I saw is also horizontal, which allows LaMonte to more easily hide the break lines. In her vertical dresses, the lines are much more obvious.
Disclaimer: although I’ve just wrote several paragraphs describing the technique, it’s hard for me to visualize, even after watching a video that outlined it in detail. What I do understand is that it’s incredibly technically demanding, requiring an entire factory with its various glass-casting tools, a team of workers, and a good chunk of time.
Learning the nuts-and-bolts behind "Semi-Reclining Dress with Drapery" makes me appreciate it even more. Like all artwork that we find extraordinary, we look at it and "ooohhh" and "aaahhh" without taking into consideration the amount of toil the creator put into it.
The video below is a lecture and Q&A given by LaMonte. It provides even greater detail about her glass dresses, along with other artistic endeavors she's completed, as well as upcoming projects. It's the one referenced in this project, and where I've gathered much of Karen's biographical info and the technical details of her construction process.
