Reflect a Willamette Week Pick

April Surgent, The Passenger, 2010
kilnformed and cameo-engraved glass, 17" x 19.125" x 2" inches

It takes guts to look into the mirror and regard your best and worst features with equanimity. In April Surgent’s Reflect at Bullseye, the artist alternately reflects and deflects her identity and those of people around her. Her technique of carving through layers of fused glass is, much like psychoanalysis, a reductive method that must be handled delicately, lest the materials shatter. In The Passenger, she shows us a woman gazing at her reflection, clear-headed and self-aware. But in the immaculately composed four-panel work Night Crawler, shadowy figures prowl the foreground and background, the murky quality of the imagery suggesting half-repressed memories or a clouded self-concept. Intriguingly, Surgent hauled a large glass plate with her to locales around Seattle and photographed studies for many of these works through the glass. The resulting light play derives from this artifice: false but beautiful, like the aggregate of doubts and delusions of grandeur that give us the gumption to leave the house every day and engage the world. - Richard Speer

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February 17, 2010