Amber Cowan

Heller Gallery is pleased to present Gathering the Sky, Mining the Milk, our fourth solo exhibition of new work by award-winning, Philadelphia-based artist Amber Cowan, who we have represented since 2012.

Gathering the Sky, Mining the Milk will be the largest gallery exhibition of her work to date and includes three installations Champagne Gold (2022), Anthropomorphic and Melting Milk (2017-22) & Hands and Handkerchiefs (2016-22); two major wall assemblages Ecco to the Bridesmaid: ‘I Know Not What Has Happened To Your Pod’ and Soft Simplicity in Bittersweet Orange, Lemon and Mandarin (both 2022) as well as five medium size wall grotto pieces, two new sculptural works and several smaller cluster wall works.

Cowan’s diorama style wall-sculpture assemblages are made of collected, re-cycled, re-worked and now also custom-made, pressed glass. The exhibition title itself is a nod to the names used for certain proprietary colors – sky, a light blue, and milk, an opaque white - developed by individual manufacturers. Her source pieces were once commercially produced in the best-known, but now defunct, glass factories mostly in the United States. New for Gathering the Sky, Mining the Milk, are historical pieces made in France (in Pen & Signett Swimming in Sky) and Czechoslovakia (in Ecco to the Bridesmaid: ‘I Know Not What Has Happened To Your Pod’), as well as custom-made components.

Cowan’s new approach is also reflected in the bold steps she has taken to acquire very particular pieces to work into her wall installations. In the past, she came across most of the source material through chance – as gifts, from scrap yards, antique stores and online sales – but now she researches specific vintage colors and the factories where they were produced throughout their history. She has even acquired and restored an original side-lever press and many press molds. One such mold was used to custom produce the fans in a glass color they were never originally made. They are prominently featured in the Fountain with Fans in River and Jade.

One of the centerpieces is the blue diptych Ecco to the Bridesmaid: ‘I Know Not What Has Happened To Your Pod.’ The piece both continues the saga of the Bridesmaid, a glass figurine and a recurring Cowan character, but also introduces an environment inspired by her interest in early video games, here specifically Sega’s 1992 ‘Ecco the Dolphin.’ Cowan calls these games her first encounter with a digital fantasy world and while she gives it a decidedly feminist spin, it is the back and forth between the emerging metaverse and the physical object that most clearly communicates her desire to activate her characters and lead the viewer into the piece, as if it were a still from a fantasy movie. It is in this piece also that a Louis Comfort Tiffany signature (on a glass shard) takes a star turn. While her pieces are often filled with surprise anonymous contributions of glass-makers past, here she pays homage to a glass giant from another time, echoing Tiffany’s spirit of innovation and looking both to the past & to the future.

With graduate school a decade behind her, Cowan has attained master-level skill, which allows her to be uninhibited by technique. Perhaps even more importantly, she has also gained the confidence to put front and center what she first fell in love with about glass and why despite its kitsch-prone practices it has remained the central focus of her work. Cowan calls glass ‘a deliciously permanent eye candy material’ and leans confidently into this side of it. “The word ‘eye candy’ has been such an unwanted term with glass, especially in academic circles, but I am OK with that,” she notes with a mix of satisfaction and perspective. It is this newly confident point of view that distinguishes the 2022 body of work from the pieces that came before.

Amber Cowan received her MFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 2011. She is the 2014 recipient of the prestigious Rakow Commission from the Corning Museum of Glass. Her work has been published in the Corning Museum’s New Glass Review, the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Craft Magazine and Glass Quarterly and featured in museum exhibitions across the United States, in Europe and in China. Her work is included in the collections of the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; the Brunnier Museum, University of Iowa, Ames, IA; the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI. In 2018 Cowan was honored by UrbanGlass for her contributions to the field and in 2021 was named a USA Artist Fellow.