Veruska Vagen’s art is a fusion of art history scholarship and her studio practise as a painter. Her early glass enamel work brought her to the renowned Pilchuck school, where she became an art historian for William Morris, compiling visual source material for various studio projects. She began personal experimention with a brand new material she discovered in her research called dot de verre and (rather happily for the viewer) found a material embodiment of her conceptual interests in archival systems and glass designs executed on an intimate scale.
Combining the look of Roman mosaics, Photoshop filters and Medieval tapestries, Vagen's current work focuses on the portrait as a vehicle for merging epoch’s and styles of art that are at first incongruous. The use of dot de verre, a material developed incidentally by an inventor and aerospace engineer in Florida (he called the glass "confetti" with good reason!), acts as a literal and metaphorical fusion of these histories. Inspired by individual painting technique, a beautiful face or compeling expression she sees the glass portrait as offering communication beyond our temporal existence. Echoing Duchamp’s idea that art is a game played by all artists across all time, Vagen states: "The emotional vocabulary of faces remains unchanging over time, a shared language that gives a gift of enabling us to recognize ourselves in each other."
Education
Pilchuck Glass School
Northern Arizona University, BFA
University of Colorado
Professional
2000-Present U.S. Facilitator for Hiroshi Yamano
Selected Exhibitions
2010 Eyes on Glass, Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA
2009 Enduring Grace, Solo Exhibition, Davis and Cline Gallery, Ashland OR
2008 Glorious Glass: Translucent and Opaque, The Arts Center, St. Petersburg, FL
2007 Timeless Faces, Solo Exhibition, Davis and Cline Gallery, Ashland, OR
Behind Glass: Creativity and Collaboration, The Arts Center, St. Petersburg, FL
2006 It’s All About Beads, Pismo Fine Art, Denver, CO
2005 Multiplicity: Glass in All Its Glory, Sea-Tac International Airport, Seattle, WA
2004 Pixelated, Heller Gallery, New York ,NY
The Havery Collection: International Glass, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL
2003 Fabulous Faces, Solo Retrospective Exhibition, Century Square, Seattle, WA
2+2=Art: The Art of Mathematics, Arts Council of Snohomish County, Everett, WA
Glorious Glass: Color & Form, Sea-Tac International Airport, Seattle, WA
2002 Pilchuck Glass School At 30, Sea-Tac International Airport, Seattle, WA
. Venice International Art Biennial, Venice, Italy
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