Ryan Legassicke & Tanya Lyons: Crafting Conceptual Art - By Rachel Gotlieb

The history of craft in Canada is a short one, and for both studio furniture and studio glass shorter still. It was not until the 1980s that the movement began to flourish. Today, studio glass receives strong encouragement for both conceptual and decorative glass: Sandra Ainsley Gallery in Toronto, Gallerie Elena Lee in Montreal and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo are just some examples of the existing infrastructure. For studio furniture it’s a different story. Few Canadian galleries or museums support it and fewer still understand its recent push towards individual expression.

Tanya Lyons based in Lachine, Ouebec and Ryan Legassicke in Toronto, represent the new upstarts in the fields of glass and furniture respectively. Both are graduates of Sheridan College but choose to harness their craft training to the concep­tual realm. They avoid conventional production work and practical issues of form and function. Their artistic inquiry is eclectic and strongly connected to nature through their desire to incorporate natural and found objects. Despite their pull towards pure artistic expression what makes their work so distinctive is its bond with functionality and design. Two concerns drive Tanya Lyons' art: identity and nature. Growing up with a twin sister, who is also an artist, has height­ened her awareness of uniqueness and interaction between individuals. Her passion for the outdoors makes her a "gatherer" a collector of natural objects.

At Sheridan College, the late Daniel Crichton convinced Lyons that hot glass, rather than furniture, was her calling and instructor Kevin Lockau motivated her to use the material as a medium for visual art. As an exchange student at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, she visited the great Finnish production glass studios and decided to abandon what she calls, "the distraction and seduction of coloured glass." Returning to Canada, she created Gathering Bowls (igg8), see-through sealed glass pods and bowls, which entrap cattail fluff, moss and other natural elements. She also explored the notion of identity by filling vessels with materials reflecting the attributes of her peers.

After Sheridan, Lyons completed post-graduate work at the Toyama Institute of Glass Art in Japan. Adjusting to the country's language and customs was difficult (in Helsinki she was accompanied by other Sheridan exchange students). The isolation inspired her to continue investigating identity issues and she developed her first glass dress collection, which is now becoming something of a signature in her work. Mood Changing (1997) presents three life-size dresses: two made of glass objects, the third of wood twigs. One dress displays countless glass fairy wings; the other hundreds of tiny glass daisies enclosing dried petals. The dresses are both beautiful and disturbing. Many a girl has dreamed of wearing Cinderella's glass slippers, but a glass gown-how unexpected. Their beauty lies in the detail and in the pattern but their fragility recalls the confining female fashions of the past centuries.

Today's vogue for transparency and translucency in fashion and design makes Lyons' work very current. Not surprisingly, the style conscious hospitality market is taking notice of Lyons' beautiful glass works. She completed a 15 foot-tall suspended wall dress made of metal mesh and glass for the recently opened boutique Hotel Le Germain in Toronto. Last year, the Shangri-La Hotel in Hong Kong commissioned eight wall-mounted pods containing herbs and spices for its restaurant. 

Intentionally or not, Lyons appears to be entering the world of small series and possibly production. Currently she is making two morefull-size sculptural glass dresses for the Sandra Ainstey Gallery in Toronto. She's also creating "wearable glass," one outfit notably worn by Sharon Lewis when she hosted the CBC television show ZeD. With a colleague she met in Helsinki, Lyons is developing a line of functional glass and felt accessories. Last summer, she made a whimsical collection of glass ornaments including transparent rocks, birdbaths and spherical pond floats for Art in the Garden at Kiwi Gardens in Perth, Ontario.

Ryan Legassicke focuses on process and history of making as well as the viewer’s interaction with the furniture itself. He invites the viewer “to question if the furniture was once lost and now found, or, is it newly created or adapted.” Kevin Lockau and Gordon Peteran, trailblazers in this field of conceptual work, encouraged Legassicke to pursue a more conceptual approach at Sheridan College. Legassicke's thesis project, This is Wood, depicts an oversize cantilevered raw wood bench and is an ironic tribute to the master craftsperson and fine cabinetry.

At the Alberta College of Art and Design, Legassicke honed up on his glass skills, but more importantly continued his interest in the theory of creating and experiencing functional art. It paid off when he returned to Toronto where his installation Lunch won the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition’s Best in Show and Sculpture Award (2001). Legassicke constructed a three-dimensional tableau for himself and three friends to eat lunch. The suite of furniture includes a mish-mash collection of seating: one Windsor chair-back is attached to a tree stump base while another is supported on a bed of tree branches; two tall back chair are made of roughly hewn wood. For the table he juxtapose natural wood and plastic wood grain, and he continues the awkward hybrid down to the base, using a junk metal leg and wood plank for supports. He unites the design by scorching a table setting of burn rings on the surface. This installation, as with much of Legassicke's work, reveals that he's part of the blue box generation. What his urban neighbours throw away and how others find and adapt the refuse into a new context, fascinates him. But this not only a reflection of environmental consciousness, it is expediency. These found and waste materials are far more affordable than veneer-the usual fare of studio furniture makers.

In 2003, Legassicke created the furniture ensemble entitled, Blocks of Wood for the Ontario Craft Council's retail shop and exhibition space, The Guild Shop. Made of laminated and reinforced plywood with peeled maple sticks, the desk and chairs are, dare it be said, almost functional. Yet the solid middle drawer is only a symbol of function.

Both Lyons and Legassicke's work share close affinities with the avant-garde Dutch movement, "Droog Design". The darling of design critics and curators, more importantly, Droog has reintroduced poetry and meaning into everyday objects by experimenting with wearable glass art, log benches juxtaposed with historical seat backs and found furniture blow-torched into new identities. While some may find Droog designers a touch glib, they are important models for craftmakers because they have few inhibitions licensing a design for mass production, working in batch production, or creating one-off sculpture.

In the age of convergence; doing away with boundaries between craft, art and design is a direction forward. If Lyons and Legassicke to embrace the conceptual but also maintain a close connection to their craft and design, they too will find that the hierarchies in the fields will disappear.