“LaMonte’s work presents us with a visual conundrum, light and diaphanous at first glance yet with monumental gravitas and cold, deathly physicality on closer inspection. The object is clearly hollow, but the imprint of the wearer of this glacial carapace remains visible through the glass, and the artist herself becomes the invisible manipulator, not only of the organization of materials, form and process, but also of the imprinted image and evidence of this invisible woman. Was she Cinderella, in a frantic dash against time, leaving behind her entire dress and not just a shoe, or Lot’s Wife, punished further in some bizarre transmutation of salt to glass? Perhaps she was the voluptuous Anita Ekberg, whose wet ball gown in the classical surrounds of the Fontana di Trevi crystallized forever the concept of ‘la dolce vita;’ or Princess Diana, the media-constructed image of her fragile and vulnerable fashionability snap-frozen in time. In the popular imagination, such fabulous women transcend earthly constraints, leaving the rest of us with the usual catalogue of remnants to reconstruct in their memory.”

Karen LaMonte uses clothing as a metaphor for identity and human presence. In her large-scale sculptures, rendered in glass, clothing becomes a window to the interior where we encounter the impression of a human body, its absence articulating memory. Using the enormous physicality and durability of glass in contrast with its invisibility and fragility, she urges a passage from the concrete to the ephemeral, from the tangible world to that which is imperceptible.

The artist describes her process as follows: “We have two skins that outline and define who we are. One is our natural skin, our body, but we obscure and conceal it beneath clothing, which is a second skin, our social skin. Clothing is used to both protect the individual and project a persona. It is a ‘vestmentary envelope,’ which renders us as social beings. Clothing draws the body so that it can be culturally seen, and articulates it in a socially meaningful form. It is a powerful non-spoken language. It is armor and costume, plumage and camouflage. Clothing separates public from private space. I am exploring this non-spoken language, looking at how it can be used either to inform, or mislead and beguile the viewer, and oneself. I use transparency to investigate the relationship between clothing and being and between presence and absence. It is an invitation to explore what lies beneath the surface.”

LaMonte received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. She is the recent recipient of the 2002 Urban Glass Award for New Talent in Glass, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation’s 2001 Biennial Award. In 1998 she won a Fulbright Fellowship, which enabled her to live and work in the Czech Republic, where her sculptures are cast. Her work is represented in museum collections such as the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; and the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, WI.