Legroom for Daydreaming // Nicola Kozicharow
An essay response to Levi Glass’ Legroom for Daydreaming
Levi Glass’s Legroom for Daydreaming invites curiosity and encourages enquiry. This intriguing assortment of visual puzzles and strange devices stirs our desire to investigate what we see. Not limited to a singular meaning or interpretation, Glass’s sculptural assemblages generate an active, open relationship between audience and art. Here, ordinary materials and mundane, domestic items gain the capacity to inspire, awe, and delight.
Levi Glass’ Legroom for Daydreaming, May 21-July 3, 2021, at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.
By encouraging exploratory interactions with objects that can instill wonder, Glass’s work revives the kind of viewing practices associated with early modern Wunderkammern or “cabinets of curiosity.” In these sixteenth- and seventeenth- century collections, the natural world, craft, art, science, and technology intersected, sometimes in a single object. Minerals, live or stuffed animal specimens, scientific devices, automatons, maps, and engravings of strange beasts were spread out on display tables or revealed by opening cabinets and drawers. Often peculiar or rare, these items were meant to be picked up, passed around, inspected, and guessed about. Above all, cabinets of curiosity centred on the idea that our optical and haptic engagement with things could expand our way of seeing – sometimes literally through telescopes and other devices – and enhance our knowledge of the world.
“Legroom for Daydreaming involves approaching the things that we encounter in our daily lives without a second thought – trashcans, bowls, bannisters, tables, whiskey bottles – in a new way.”
Legroom for Daydreaming involves approaching the things that we encounter in our daily lives without a second thought – trashcans, bowls, bannisters, tables, whiskey bottles – in a new way. In the early modern period, wonder was often linked to the thrill of recognition – when something once familiar was suddenly rendered strange. In Glass’s hands, even mass-produced plastic undergoes a metamorphosis: a tacky snowglobe becomes a phantasmagoria of colour and light, and cheap salad bowls are joined together to form lamps fit for an upscale boutique. His combination of electric light and sleek design entices and allures the spectator, engaging our senses. We long to use that dazzling bottle of hand sanitizer, which brings some cheer to coating our hands in an unpleasant – if necessary – sticky substance. From prismatic lenses to cool chrome, polished glass to carved wood, both commercial and hand-made media give us aesthetic and tactile pleasure, which makes a closer inspection of details like the maple discs capping the lamps highly rewarding.
Glass’s art shifts our perspective on materials and objects by disassociating them from their original use. In standard commercial design, shape informs us about function, but Legroom for Daydreaming is full of inventive amalgamations and unexpected forms. What looks like an Op art sculpture is in fact a trashcan, and a boombox, which doubles as a bookrest, is sinuously carved from wood to resemble a heart. While artisans crafted drinking vessels out of rare items like ostrich eggs and nautilus shells for cabinets of curiosity, Glass repurposes seemingly unremarkable things into composite artworks, often eliciting surprise. Bowls, then, become lamps, a BBQ motor powers a kaleidoscopic device, and in Knucklebone Oculus, curved metal from a wheelchair is reworked to create a hanging wall lamp.
Glass’s hybrid Métis and German heritage and interest in building practices that fuse Indigenous and European elements inform his imaginative blending of commercial, artistic, and natural materials. Indigenous wood, especially that of the evergreen conifer, is a crucial component of his domestic objects, which are often accented with colonial red paint. The rich red tone appears like a leitmotif throughout the installation, drawing different artworks together. Glass also stimulates our senses with textures particular to the natural environment of Canada. He accentuates the grains and whorls of wood with paint, especially in Newell Post, and through the hyper-real resolution of the photos in Prie-Nature we can practically smell the cedar trees and touch their feathery leaves and scratchy bark.
Fallen (Commercial Lamps), 2018-2021.
Levi Glass’ Legroom for Daydreaming, May 21-July 3, 2021, at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.
In Glass’s creative process, the act of construction leads to experimentation and play. Even with a particular object or design in mind, exploring and tinkering with a given material when trying to build something or get it to work can lead to frustrations, problems, and failure. The sculptural media Glass uses involve sawing, hammering, carving, and cutting materials that will, inevitably, scratch, break, incur damage, or crack. Working in new technologies also results in malfunctions, technical glitches, and defects; simply getting lights to switch on, wheels to turn, and buttons to work may be a challenge. These are the things that “come between” the original conception and its realization for the artist, who may fail to achieve exactly what he had first imagined in terms of form and function. Glass, however, embraces rather than resists failure and the surprises and new ways forward it may illuminate. Instead of hiding or smoothing the imperfections and flaws that arise when making things by hand, he retains, incorporates, and even heightens them.
Just as Glass responds to failure with curiosity in his practice, his work invites us to do the same. Indeed, the assemblages in Legroom for Daydreaming make failure an aesthetic experience. We delight in the clunky charm of Globeachine’s rotation, Prie-Nature’s worn and squishy cushions, cracks in wood, and dents in the metal of Knucklebone Oculus. These expressive elements disassociate the artworks from streamlined industrial design. Amid technological wonders and finely crafted furniture, there is also some comfort in seeing the wires inside Newell Post’s transparent case and the array of plugs, brightly coloured extension cords, and electrical outlets throughout the exhibition. In revealing how things function, Glass offers us a glimpse behind the curtain.
Knucklebone Oculus, 2018-2021.
Levi Glass’ Legroom for Daydreaming, May 21-July 3, 2021, at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.
Perhaps the most perplexing work in the show, Knucklebone Oculus reworks and amalgamates industrial parts to create an alien and enigmatic object. Illuminated like a rare curio or specimen, the artwork, which Glass wonderfully refers to as “preposterous,” requires scrutiny and contemplation. As we sharpen our focus, a kind of optical game unfolds. The futuristic-looking ocular device, which has been forged from door peepholes, forms a constellation of different viewpoints. By housing the oculus in a glass case reminiscent of equipment in early modern experiments, Glass presents vision itself as a subject of scientific study. The fact that the apparatus is shaped like a piece from a giant game of knucklebones or jacks, however, reminds us that seeing can also be funny.
Other assemblages in the exhibition play with our perception as well and act as training for the eye as we experience different optical sensations. Refracting the pictures and ephemera inside, the translucent surface of Trashcan generates new images and colour blends at every angle. A lustrous doubling effect occurs when the metal photoprint of Fallen reflects the real lamps’ fluorescence. The stained-glass-like inlay technique in Prie-Nature causes various components of cedar trees to converge and align.
The act of looking becomes a flight of fancy in another technological marvel, Globeachine. It is easy to get lost in this enchanting “daydream machine,” as the artist calls it. Opposite a glowing orb – adapted from a conventional ceiling fixture – the wheel of vividly coloured, sparkling snowglobes turns in hypnotic rotation on a BBQ spit roaster – an item remarkably capable of whimsy in Glass’s hands. The movement casts a resplendent, iridescent shimmer across the holographic photos of bicycle spokes. Like automaton devices in cabinets of curiosity, Globeachine blends artistry with science to animate the world of things. Several of Glass’s other objects have magical, near anthropomorphic qualities: Globeachine’s elegant sawhorse, the fallen lamps, Prie-Nature’s delicate, red feet, and the bulbous speaker look as if they might come alive if we leave the room.
Trashcan, 2018-2021 (foreground), and Globeachine, 2019-2021 (background).
Levi Glass’ Legroom for Daydreaming, May 21-July 3, 2021, at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.
Giving us the “legroom” to play in the gallery space, Glass toys with our childlike impulse to push buttons in Newell Post. The green button is, as he says, “asking for it.” In this amusing staging of cause and effect, a simple action stirs our sense of wonder and suspense. Can I push it? What will happen? The tantalizing urge to touch the objects in the installation is fully satisfied in Prie-Nature, which prompts the type of instructive play found in optical devices in the early modern period. We are free to kneel over the table, squint through and slide the loupe across the glossy, luminous surface, and drink in the cedar slideshow. While the title acts as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Catholicism, Prie-Nature appropriates the devotional setting associated with the prie-dieu – a piece of furniture for prayer – to enable a more introspective engagement with the beauty of the natural world. Common sights to Canadians from the West Coast, western red cedar trees, with their foliage sprays and delicate branches, are represented in forensic detail, thanks to medium-format photography. The use of new technologies to make living things more visible yielded extraordinary results in the seventeenth century, when Robert Hooke’s engravings of microscopic images first pictured plant cells, fleas, and other insects, which were too small to be seen by the naked eye. In Prie-Nature, Glass restores the early modern wonder of magnification and the delight of seeing familiar things through a different lens.
“His animate objects give us free rein to be amazed by commonplace things, enjoy the sheer pleasure of looking, indulge our curiosity, welcome failure, laugh at art, and push buttons with glee.”
Offering a break from how we usually interact with and perceive our reality, Glass’s installation causes us to daydream. His animate objects give us free rein to be amazed by commonplace things, enjoy the sheer pleasure of looking, indulge our curiosity, welcome failure, laugh at art, and push buttons with glee. And perhaps in turn, we can leave with a more inquisitive, playful, and wondrous way of “seeing” the world.
Dr. Nicola Kozicharow is Assistant Professor in History and Art History at HSE University, Moscow. She is a specialist in art and visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present, and her research interests include migration, intersections between art history and contemporary practice, and modernism and its historiographies, especially in Russia. Before joining HSE University in 2020, she was the Schulman Research Fellow in History of Art at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, and her research has been supported by the Ransom Center, Likhachev Foundation, and Getty Foundation.