Client: Montgomery Museum of Fine Art

Overview

This solo exhibition at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, “Signs of Lift”, was a grouping of 14 pieces with a common theme of the breath of life. This collection was primarily glass, but had some wood and metal. Over the two years while making this body of work, I also gained inspiration through learning to paraglide as it related so well to the ideas I wanted to ponder and share. Prior to launching into free flight, the skin of your glider remains flat on the ground till it inhales the wind and fills to the full becoming a flying machine then as the pilot loses natural thermic lift and lands, the wing exhales deflating back to a skin on the ground. Many of the pieces were expressions of the common yet life sustaining and remarkable rhythm of breath (the cycle of the inhale and the exhale). Clouds are a sign of lift in free flight and I chose to use glass versions of these to represent a community of shared breath across time (past, present, and future) and cultures. From the initial contact from the museum to the exhibition opening, I worked very closely with Jennifer Jankauskas and her team. The exhibition was designed, created, delivered and installed in a timely manner

Goals

In the words of MMFA Director, Angie Dodson, "let’s follow the lead of the artists. Let’s exit the crowded expressway of our twenty-first century lives, if only for a moment, and…wander in wonder. Let’s be still, get quiet, breathe, look, ponder, imagine, meditate, pray, daydream, talk, listen, repeat. In Cal Breed: Signs of Lift, you will be richly rewarded for doing so...It will somehow manage to do that thing that art does so well—it will slow us down and develop in us an awareness of the finest details and most wonderous curiosities of our world. Who knows, it might even bring about a stirring of our own creative impulses. That’s one of the great things about art and artists—the way they put something into our paths, something that deepens our understanding of things. In Breed’s case, the things are “meditations on breath and water,” which seem to span the spectrum—from scientific truths to the miraculous moments in nature which transcend understanding."