SAM merges Native art from past with modern styles

Thank Preston Singletary's aunt for the Seattle Art Museum's (SAM) new glass exhibit Threshold in its ongoing Native Art of the Northwest Coast floor.

Singletary, a local glass artist, brought acclaim to his field through a marriage between modern glass artistry with ancient Tlingit native designs.

In "Shadow Catcher," Singletary creates a glass hat with organic American Indian symbols crawling across it like spectral mites. Or flip it around, and the piece suddenly becomes a glass basket, casting its sharp blue shadows immediately beneath it, creating a spectral effect.

Surprisingly, Preston had never turned the piece around until his Aunt Theresa "discovered this wonderful shadowy effect."

"She put it on a pedestal, shined light through it and the shadows kind of fell through," Singletary told a capacity crowd at the SAM May 21.

"Of course, that's what I intended on all along," he said sarcastically.

Singletary said that his pieces are made by blowing a shape, and when the piece cools, outlining a unique design with rubber tape. Next, he sketches the details and then slices tape according to the design so he can sandblast specific areas. When completed, he removes the tape, allowing the original designs to reveal itself.

The aura and mystery from the past slips into Singletary's work, playing respectfully to the artist's ancestry. Singletary said his family crest is the killer whale, which is dominated in the works provided to the SAM. A 72-by-92-inch glass panel series titled "Keet Shagoon" -- which means killer whale in Tlingit -- fills a wall, resembling a flattened totem pole and allowing few to notice that the object is actually a fused, sand-blasted glass screen. The whale is quite vivid in the red almost plastic-like design. There's also a whale mask -- and the detail in the glass creation causes a double take.

Singletary's love for ravens adds a bit of entropy to an almost supernatural aura in the exhibit. In one piece, a frog sits on a man's chest, a tangled tongue kissing his black face. Together, they lie upon the back of a raven, about to lift off to the heavens. In "Raven Steals the Moon," a giant raven sits with its mouth open about to gobble up the whole moon -- and maybe even the entire night sky.

The new exhibit sits like ripples in a flowing river. It's just as easy to go from art created within the past few months, to 200-year-old Native American masks.

Threshold comes at a perfect time. In a few weeks, the 33rd annual Glass Art Society Conference will be hosted in Seattle. It also serves as a way to remember the late John Hauberg, a SAM trustee and former president of the board, for whom the museum actually purchased Singletary's "Keet Shagoon." Hauberg had been known for donating both glass art and Northwest American Indian pieces.