Hence in contemporary life, design more or less indicates the site where art and technology
             (along wit their respective evaluative and scientific ways of thinking) come together as
             equals, making a new form of culture possible.
                                                                              Vilem Flusser “About the Word Design” (1993)

The Czech-born philosopher Vilem Flusser suggests that design spans the gulf between art, craft, and technology (industry) that emerged in the 19 th and continues tensely today. The work of Myra Mimlitsch- Gray may not seek to imbricate these fields, but it strikingly activates the frequently fraught yet fertile space in between. Her dynamic and dimensional practice manifests a deepening inquiry and repeated transgressions of the conventions of art, craft, and design through a critical engagement of the volatile relationship of production processes, material applications, and cultural meanings.

In the past 20 years, Mimlitsch-Gray has emerged as one of the artistic and intellectual leaders of the metals field. She makes jewelry (arguably one of the staples of the field), but the most distinctive and innovative area of her practice is hollowware that concurrently observes and crosses boundaries, questioning the history and conventions of domestic objects, as well as the artist's own accomplished virtuosity. Mimlitsch-Gray works with unerring precision towards mutation and imperfection. She has made chafing dishes, candlesticks, and candelabra that are brilliantly formed and formless, emblematic and imminently errant ( Chafing Dish, 2002, below.)


Once reliable, pristine forms ooze in sublime domestic disorder undermining purpose and protocol. In another example of process gone eloquently awry, the surface of a serving tray is an unsettled topography of kettles and moraines ( Planished Rectangular Tray, 2002, below). The ungainly surface distorts and magnifies a planishing process where increasingly meticulous hammer strikes render a refined, unblemished surface.

Pursuing a practice that assiduously questions her role as an artist and how and what she makes, in spring 2007 she embraced new challenges in the heat and heart of the immense iron foundry at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Kohler is the nation's leading plumbingware manufacturer. Arts/Industry, Kohler's long-term artist residency program, encourages and enables artists to pursue and exploit a generous range and scale of production processes and the relationship of art, design, and industry.

This exhibition includes works completed just prior to and during her residency at Kohler. Wooden (2006, below) continues a line of inquiry and presages an expanding interest in the somatic as a joint between nature and culture. Wooden is a trickster in ambiguous disguise. It is a decaying limb with branches. It is a centerpiece that falls short of its elegant aspirations. Its eccentricities, vulnerabilities, and scaled-to-the-body dimensions create an awkward identification and attraction.


Beginning with the handle of her mother's cast iron frying pan, Mimlitsch-Gray created a comic series of disquietingly disfigured pans and skillets. There are pans for brats (a staple of Wisconsin where Kohler is located), pans that have been oddly coupled, and others that have stretched and slithered under their own weight ( Brat Pans, 2007, below, and Freestanding Skillet, 2007.) Seen in ensemble, this mutant cookware seems shaped and sized to accommodate the aberrations and excesses of genetically engineered agriculture and food products.

Abandoning the formats of commonplace and ceremonial domestic objects and utensils, Mimlitsch-Gray made new works that, on their variable edges and surfaces, interior and exterior spaces, register the casting process. The forms and edges ripple, bend, twist, and torque reflecting the imperfect seams and joints of handmade molds as they resist or yield to the movement and weight of liquid metal in the casting process. Trunk Sections (2007), below and Limbs (2007) are vascular sculptures that invoke trees trunks, human torsos and limbs, or enlarged sections of circulatory systems. They are simultaneously animate and still, ducts and stationary objects, resonant yet mute. Materially substantial yet strategically undefined, they are both more and less.

For an artist who has moved so openly and alertly in the region between art, design, craft, and technology, this recent work summons a significant new chapter. These pieces reflect ideas that are directly, explicitly, and unmistakably about what it means to make something through a radical transformation of materials in actual and implied motion. Determined and accidental, premeditated and equivocal, substantial and unsettled, confident and speculative, these intrepid works produced in the apex of art, industry, independent thinking, and material transformation offer striking evidence of the potential of a new form of culture – and a new culture of forms.