Glass flowers nestled inside hunks of glass finely shaven down with diamonds. A mesmerizing orb that appears to be floating, but is in fact just a two-dimensional acrylic painting on canvas.
At the entrance to "Fooling the Eye: Optics of Vasarely and Kuhn," visitors will notice an array of small glass orbs and paperweights that look like they have actual flowers inside. But it's all an optical illusion, an imaginary world embedded in glass created by artist Paul J. Stankard.
"[Stankard] is really known for hidden details, so if you look at the roots of some of the pieces, they have hidden figures and then the mirror helps reflect the bottom of them so that you see the faces and things like that," said Cafesjian Art Trust Museum Executive Director Andy Schlauch.
Inside the gallery, there are more than 40 works by two artists who are known for creating optical illusions in their art. Glass artist Jon Kuhn's laborious glass sculptures, many of which take several years to complete, often have geometrical designs embedded in them and reflect slices of rainbow-tinted light onto the floor and the walls, and are influenced by Eastern philosophies. Hungarian-born artist Victor Vasarely (1906-1997) is known as the grandfather of Op Art — the 1960s movement where artists used geometric shapes and perspectives to create eye-bending visual effects.
The majority of the work in this show comes from the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum's collection, which houses more than 3,000 works of primarily glass art.
"Kuhn reveals things in his work, and Vasarely plays with your depth perception," Schlauch said. "I thought it would be fun for people to learn about how artists figure out how the brain works before psychologists even did in the 1960s, which led to the Op Art Movement, but artists have been doing it since the Renaissance."
A visual connection
Often, the two artists play off each other, even though they weren't necessarily in each other's lives, though this is the second time that Kuhn and Vasarely have been in an exhibition together. The first time was at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Mich., that also happened to be Kuhn's first museum show.
