NYAB Event - Christina Bothwell “Toy Chronicles”

Christina Bothwell “Toy Chronicles”

Heller Gallery

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Bothwell calls toys ‘lost souls come to life; unanchored in time, their former owners gone, they are beings that have awareness apart from people.’ Toy Chronicles, comprised of twelve new and recent works, will focus on the artist’s penchant for toys. Pieces in the exhibition range from Dog, a major new sculpture to two intimately scaled objects inspired by the Hindu deity, Vishnu – Lord Vishnu on Garuda and Vishnu #2. Made of cast glass, clay and vintage toy parts, the physical objects before us seem to be an otherworldly union of the artist’s own mythology and her lucid dreams. The artist describes her work as ‘trying to suggest the non-linear within the confines of the corporeal.’

Bothwell’s fantastic and strangely compelling sculptures range from fascinating to disturbing. Her pieces allow us to enter, if only in a glance, into a fertile subconscious and reveal a vulnerability we may recognize as our own.

Christina Bothwell originally trained as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA. Starting in 1995 she moved to working three-dimensionally with clay and glass. She has won numerous scholarships and grants including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Virginia A. Groot Foundation award for excellence in sculpture. Bothwell’s work is held in permanent public collections such as the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning NY; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; Shanghai Museum of Glass Art, Shanghai, China; Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL; Palm Springs Museum, Palm Springs, CA and the Alexander Tutsek - Stiftung foundation, Munich, Germany. A solo exhibition of Bothwell’s work at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art is scheduled for summer of 2015.