New York Times Style Magazine: Going for Broke
Installation view, After You’re Gone, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, photo credit: RISD
By Alix Browne
Sept. 25, 2008
A slab of cheese, a mound of pigs’ feet, wedges of watermelon, a bowl of eggs and a platter of oysters have all been left to ruin on the massive wooden dining room table. A towering centerpiece, pregnant with fruit, has keeled over, taking out goblets and candlesticks in its wake. Already, snails are arriving in droves. A squirrel, eyeing the situation from its perch on the wall nearby, prepares to fling itself into the tableau. This scene of out-and-out gluttony, teetering on the brink of chaos, is all the more precarious because it is made entirely of glass.
“Still Life With Metal Pitcher” (2007) is the focal point of the artist Beth Lipman’s installation “After You’re Gone,” on view at the RISD Museum of Art in Providence, R.I., through January 2009. Lipman describes the work as a distorted interpretation of Dutch still life painting, drawing parallels between the golden era of that genre and today’s consumerism, and she does it all through the medium of glass. Inspired by a visit to the Pendleton House, the RISD Museum’s 1906 neo-Georgian wing, she brought even more to the already loaded table, adding glass topiaries, a pair of convex glass portraits and an alarmingly ornate glass claw-foot settee, to create her own version of a period room.