Reflecting The Past -- Artist Josiah Mcelheny Has A Passion For Creating Glass With Roots In Ancient Rome

-------- ART SHOW --------

An art show by Josiah McElheny is at the Donald Young Gallery, 2107 Third Ave., through August. Hours are Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

The two blue-tinted, translucent glass dishes have been carefully, symmetrically placed in the glass display case like precious specimens. They are about six inches across with edges that turn upward like an `S', and have the look of antique petri dishes, not quite bowls but also not as flat as plates. Bits of something chalky cling to their inner edges and the cobwebby matter has been painstakingly preserved, since one swish of a brush would likely whisk the dishes clean.

A white file card in the case informs the viewer that the "two plates were found in front of a husband and wife who were eating dinner in Pompeii when the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried them and their surroundings in ash. The glassblower who happened to make these plates added unnecessary folds which trapped food residue and ash. Because of this, traces of grain from the couple's last meal together were preserved."

Display is an epitaph

It is a poignant story that transforms the old-fashioned, museum-style display into a poetic epitaph. The information on the card makes the clinical display of ancient dishes intensely intimate - it apparently is the only physical reminder of a couple who lived nearly 2,000 years ago and died in a catastrophe so unexpected that they ate dinner as death swept over them.

For Josiah McElheny, the 28-year-old Seattle glass artist who created it, the display is also a technical coup.

"I wanted to use real food on these dishes," said McElheny, an irrepressibly enthusiastic man who describes himself as a former high school "bookworm."

While many glass artists cultivate an artistic machismo and dress like young Marlon Brandos, all bulging biceps underneath taut T-shirts, McElheny has the boyish, clean-cut looks of an Eagle scout. He is dressed for an interview and a subsequent art opening in a perfectly pressed white dress shirt, tan slacks and well polished dress shoes. He looks like a graduate teaching assistant in military history.

"I tried cheese, potatoes, bread crumbs. And the bread crumbs worked. It was a breakthrough. But they have to be Italian bread crumbs with basil and oregano," he says, grinning a little at the humor in this. When the crumbs are applied to the hot, nearly molten blown glass during the cooling process, McElheny says the searing crumbs "smell like toast."

No prankster

McElheny, an up and coming artist who's work is currently on display at the Donald Young Gallery in Seattle and the Seattle Art Museum, doesn't mean to trick people, despite his obvious delight in perfecting techniques to make new glass look ancient. Though he created the glass dishes for the art work he calls "Residue (Husband and Wife)," and wrote the museum-like blurb for the card, he is not an art prankster.

Inspired instead by a romantic, adoring reverence for ancient glass, a fascination with the interpretation of history, and the meaning of "real" historical art objects versus fakes and reproductions, he is a conceptual artist who also happens to be a glassblower. In an art field famous for its inherent decorativeness - and sometimes dismissed because of it - McElheny's philosophical focus is unusual.

While many glass artists make the logical decision to exploit the medium's extravagantly glamorous qualities, McElheny has never created anything remotely Chihulyesque. The sole theme of his short career has been the investigation and reproduction of ancient glass objects, usually from the Roman empire. Romans discovered glass blowing in the first century before Christ, and became highly proficient at making goblets, vials, and flasks that were utilitarian and at the same time starkly elegant.

Tina Oldknow, director of the Donald Young Gallery and a former curator of ancient art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says McElheny is extremely proficient technically.

"I've seen plenty of fakes," said Oldknow. "Josiah's reproductions are very well done. Not only in the craftsmanship that goes into them, but he has studied them so much that he understands the spirit and proportions of ancient glass, and that's hard to get."

Though McElheny protests that "I'm not the best glass blower, I'm just stubborn," he is obviously skilled. He moved to Seattle several years ago because two of the area's most acclaimed glass artists, Dick Marquis and Dante Marioni, wanted McElheny to work for them.

In the past two years McElheny has had two solo shows in Seattle, one in New York, and a group show in New York. In 1993 he won a Betty Bowen Memorial Special Recognition Award, the equivalent of an honorable mention in a SAM-sponsored competition considered one of the most prestigious in the region.

Fell in love

McElheny says he fell in love with Roman glass when he was a glass-blowing student in Rome in the mid-'80s. A native of Boston, he had been attending the Rhode Island School of Design when he signed up for the school's Rome program. Once in Italy, he visited all the museums that showed ancient glass.

"I became kind of obsessed with Roman glass," said McElheny. "Even though I was learning glass blowing, those were the first glass objects that I really liked. I thought, that's what I wished I owned. If I was a collector, I would collect Roman glass. Of course, I couldn't, so I started making my own, with my own cases."

McElheny later apprenticed with a master glass blower in a village of 30 in Sweden. His expression of gratitude to the village for hosting him was to build a "museum" of glass blowing in the nearby woods. He built a rough-hewn log hut about 8 feet by 8 feet, then added a a small display of blown glass. In eight glass pieces and a couple of maps, he traces the history of blown glass from the Roman Empire to modern Scandinavia. To someone who describes himself as "naturally nostalgic and interested in the past," creating his own tiny museum, from the building to the information cards, is perhaps the ultimate art project.

McElheny also calls himself a romantic, which not only helps explain his art but his view on life. Recently he and his American fiancee went to the Swedish village where he apprenticed to be married, an event that became a village-wide party.

The show at Donald Young Gallery is full of embroidered history. McElheny has a scholar's fascination with the footnotes of history, the quirkier and more arcane, the better. One display of glass vials, beakers and glasses displayed in what looks like a 19th-century apothecary's case is called "The Theory of Fire," and it has to do with the now discounted 18th-century belief that all surviving Roman glass has an iridescent cast because it was exposed to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. It is now known that the chemistry of aging causes the iridescence.

Another case, called "The Theory of Tears," is full of scientific-looking clear vials, reproductions of a shape commonly found in Roman tombs. Until this century, it was believed that these vials caught the tears of mourners and were then buried with the dead. Now they are thought to have been used as vessels to hold cosmetics.

Truth or fiction?

McElheny delights in such slippery historical idiosyncrasies, and says he works hard at writing the exhibition cards.

"The truth and the fiction are blended very tightly," he says. "A lot of it is true, some of it is sort of true. I try to make it so a glass historian would say that it could happen."

His scholarly research is so thorough that he quotes glass references - such as the notion that the vials held mourners' tears - in ancient, poetic sources including the writings of Ovid and Pliny.

"If all this were impossible it wouldn't be so romantic," he said. "But the fact is that history is all malleable."