Sheridan College, Toronto, Press Mold Demo, 2014 from Mark Hursty.

 

Bi Press Mold, 2014 from Mark Hursty.

 

Beginning Glassblowing, Guangzhou Polytechnic, China, Fulbright Research from Mark Hursty.

 

Muqarna LED tests, Attaya Projects with Lalya Gaya, Newcastle UK, 2014 from Mark Hursty.

 

Press Curve Shanghai from Mark Hursty.

 

Metal Pour Alfred University, National Casting Center from Mark Hursty.

 

Metabellum from Mark Hursty and Ball State University.

 

Making Tang Dynasty Horses from Recycled Spirits Bottles from Mark Hursty.

 

El Mort de la Masa - The Death of Mass by Mark Hursty.

 

 

 

Excerpt from the Elusive Matter exhibition catalog essay entitled:
Verb List Compilation for Three Artists: Jane Aaron, Lauren Kalman, Mark Hursty
By Kate Mondloch

 

To drip, to divide, to reveal: Mark Hursty
Hursty’s El Mort de la Massa (2008) similarly engages the viewer’s body and prompts visceral reactions. This video, too, is both beautiful and haunting—what is it? The silent non-narrative footage is supremely mysterious although, in its liquid amorphousness and evocative coloring, immediately sexualized and scatological—Blood? Semen? Lava?

 

The work’s silence and relative abstraction opens itself up to any number of interpretations—from low-resolution combat scenes on the evening news to geology videos screened in elementary school—in any case, viewers are obliged to supply the narrative. (Spoiler alert: the images are molten glass submerged in liquid. Hursty has explored conceptual and material issues surrounding glass art in many media, including Shelter (2008), a photograph included in the current exhibition.) El Mort de la Massa plays with the unlikely combined legacy of action painting (Barnett Newman’s zips, Jackson Pollock’s drips) and gaming (explosions of sorts on opposing screens). Like Aaron and Kalman, Hursty’s engagement of craft materials nonetheless grants technology a certain prominence: the split-screen division and horizontal orientation renders apparent the technological mediation and process required for what might otherwise be taken for “pure” documentation. Part of a long line of artists interested in exploring the properties of humble and craft materials, Hursty profitably updates these traditional concerns by weaving them together with pertinent issues surrounding screen-based visuality.

 

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Excerpted from The Oregonian-Bob Hicks

 

The Museum of Contemporary Craft has a firm grip on the remote control, and it's not afraid to use it.

 

…Glass artist Mark Hursty describes his obsession as a craft artist with "the in-betweening of the process" -- the importance in stop-motion animation, for example, of "the endeavor between each shot."

 

That makes craft more of a verb than a noun, and it emphasizes the fleeting, elusive quality of craft. Against a historical backdrop of craft as the creation of beautiful handmade things, its essence becomes not so much the object itself as the elusive process of arriving at the object. That's so much Hursty's priority that his two pieces in the craft museum's small group exhibit "Elusive Matter" contain no glass, although both are about the qualities of glass. One is a carefully staged photograph, the other a liquidly gorgeous short video: Think of them as windows into a gallery of the mind….

 

…Art of the mind

 

"Elusive Matter" and "Transference" play a different game, reflecting museum curator Namita Gupta Wiggers' interest in pushing craft into more conceptual territory, where the line between "craft" and "art" blurs and the mind rules the hand rather than the other way around.

 

Hursty's 2008 video "El Mort de la Massa," a strange and alluring biomorphic ramble that feels like something lively seen under a microscope, stakes out this theoretical ground. Split-screen "creatures" wriggle from the sides toward a line in the center, bang into it, expand or explode in a brief orange flash. In the time-honored tradition of craft as desirable object, it's ravishing. Yet there's nothing solid, nothing to hold or feel. The camera rolls as drops of molten glass hit water, change course and sink below the surface.