Primitive—Elegant III

Primitive — Elegant III

Lightning Pattern Blown and sand-carved glass 16.5" h x 13.5" w x 10" d

Primitive — Elegant III A Collaboration Between Preston Singletary and Dante Marioni Primitive-Elegant III celebrates the partnership of two powerhouse artists and their third collaboration. Also childhood friends, Dante Marioni and Preston Singletary first joined forces in the studio in 2011 to finally fuse their individual artistic visions into a single piece. The dynamic thrived. Primitive-Elegant I was wildly successful and territorialized a new mode for glasswork that is compositionally energetic and brave in its cultural fusion. A second collaboration and several years later, the acclaimed glassblowers continue to balance each other’s aesthetic legacies with an array of striking utilitarian baskets and shouldered vessels. Singletary’s innovative propagation of Pacific Northwest Coast artistic tradition and Marioni’s classically European construction combine Native and Italian artistic codes into intriguing pieces that playfully balance vastly different domains, elegance and primitivism, and form and function.

so emblematic. Espousing functional objects like goblets, vases, urns, and baskets, Marioni stretches, scales, and implements bold colors that push traditional Venetian glass into the realm of pop.

Singletary came into glass through Marioni, who helped him get a job as a night watchman where Marioni worked. Shortly thereafter, Singletary embraced the European glass tradition so foundational to the area’s star glassblowers.

He became a studio assistant to Benjamin Moore for over a decade, and by the mid-1990s, reconnected with his indigenous heritage and began transforming the most iconic ritual elements from the Pacific Northwest Natives into glass. The durable, luminous medium removes the rattles, hats, and symbolic totems from their ritualistic system and repositions them as light-filled contemplative objects that simultaneously preserve the past and imagine the future.

Marioni was raised amid the Seattle glass boom in an artistic family, but it was Benjamin Moore who ultimately inspired him to pursue glass blowing and at the age of 23, the young artist had his very first solo show. Pilchuck’s roster of renowned, Italian-trained teachers endowed Marioni’s work with the medium’s rich legacy. Although his shapes can evoke the antiquity of Etruscan and Greek pottery, Marioni himself more closely identifies with the elaborate renditions that made Italian glass

Parables painted on goblet sides illustrating love, war, natural orders, or spiritual affinities are not new to art history and the vessels of Primitive-Elegant III continue this narrative—but in glass. Singletary’s sandblasted bands of tribal patterning and threedimensional blown animal spirits animate Marioni’s delicate reticello lattices, slender forms, and bright colors with a new narrative. Glass art remains a molten pot of unexplored possibilities that these friends and artists are joyfully blazing.

Always Autumn Blown and sand-carved glass 16.25" h x 10" w x 10" d

Green Water Blown and sand-carved glass 17.5" h x 12" w x 12" d

Black Wolves Blown and sand-carved glass 16" h x 15" w x 13.5" d

Amber Moon Blown and sand-carved glass 22.5" h x 13.5" w x 3" d

Eagle Totem Blown and sand-carved glass 28.75" h x 12.5" w x 3.75" d

Leaf in the Wind Blown and sand-carved glass 20.75" h x 11" w x 3" d

Eagle Screen Blown and sand-carved glass 18.25" h x 12.5" w x 3" d

Cry of the Raven Blown and sand-carved glass 18.5" h x 10" w x 10" d

Crescent Moon Blown and sand-carved glass 21.75" h x 12" w x 3" d

Music of the Wolves Blown and sand-carved glass 15" h x 13" w x 4" d

Resting Bird Blown and sand-carved glass 28.75" h x 12.5" w x 3.75" d

Sea Wolf Blown and sand-carved glass 19" h x 11" w x 11" d

Eagle Crest Blown and sand-carved glass 14.75" h x 8" w x 8" d

Salmonberry Blown and sand-carved glass 12.5" h x 12" w x 12" d

Symbolize the Magical Blown glass 19" h x 11" w x 4" d

Twilight Rain Blown and sand-carved glass 19.25" h x 9.75" w x 8" d

Blue Rain Gallery 130 Lincoln Avenue, Suite C, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.954.9902 Blue Rain Contemporary 7137 East Main Street, Scottsdale, Arizona 85251 | 480.874.8110 www.blueraingallery.com