Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce the exhibition Paula Hayes: Drawings and Objects. The show will open with a reception for the artist Saturday, June 30th, 6 to 8 pm, and will run through July 30. There will be a book signing with the artist Saturday, July 7th, 4-6 pm.

This site-specific installation designed for Glenn Horowitz Bookseller will include not only the large glass terrariums for which the artist is so well known, but also a sound piece on which she collaborated with her husband, Teo Camporeale, and a variety of smaller botanical sculptures, all placed alongside the artist’s rarely exhibited drawings from the mid-1990s.

Paula Hayes’ botanical sculptures have most recently been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Lever House, the Wexner Center, and the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, where the artist received her Bachelor of Science. These sculptures — hand-blown glass terrariums containing a variety of plant life — suggest the inevitable impact humans have on their environment, but also underscore the impact of the environment on individuals. The permutations of these self-contained ecosystems, with their individually calibrated internal worlds and systems, function as analogs to the inherent uniqueness of all living things. No two can be replicated precisely, and the experience of viewing Hayes’ meticulously crafted terrariums is not unlike the experience of meeting a person, uncovering their quirks and foibles, discovering their particular topography.

The vintage drawings in the exhibition date from the early to mid-90s and reveal the underpinnings of Hayes’ aesthetic. They show her working through ideas about how the physicality of the natural world melds with the mental landscape of the interior. The developments in these early works now form the basis of her present artistic practice. Hayes has spent the past two decades developing and refining her work and she has caught the contemporary zeitgeist, as witnessed by the numerous retailers now marketing glass globes and other wares in an attempt to reach a demographic inspired by her terrariums. Thus these drawings not only contextualize the other objects in the exhibition, they also provide a window into the spirit of the contemporary era.

Born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1958, and raised on a farm in upstate New York, Paula Hayes received her BS from Skidmore College and MFA from Parsons School of Design. In the late 1980s, Hayes merged her art with everyday practical concerns by developing a gardening business in New York City to help support her graduate studies. Her work has expanded to include large-scale garden design for public and private landscapes here and abroad; hand-blown glass terrariums; malleable silicone planters that change shape in response to a plant’s growth; crocheted necklaces that cradle living plants; and birdhouses, birdbaths, and feeders.

For further information:
Jess Frost
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.
87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937
631-324-5511 – jess@glennhorowitz.com