On view April 12 through September 14 at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., “Judith Schaechter: Super/Natural” is the first exhibition to feature the internationally known glass artist’s newest work, an eight-foot-tall stained-glass dome designed for a single viewer.
The immersive stained-glass environment represents a “three-tiered cosmos” that explores the idea of biophilia, the human tendency to connect with nature.
Schaechter, who lives and works in Philadelphia, produced “Super/Natural” in a year and a half as artist-in-residence at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. While creating this multi-tiered masterpiece of glass craft, she attended lab meetings with a pioneering team of researchers and scientists who study the neural and biological basis of aesthetic experiences. Their research, and Schaechter’s recent work, explores relationships between art, beauty, morality, and the brain.
The “Super/Natural” dome’s 65 panels are filled with a riot of imagined insects, flora, plants, and birds, encouraging visitors to imagine themselves subsumed in the natural world, with all its beauty, violence, decay, and growth. The central stained-glass structure, reminiscent of a church, creates a sublime sanctuary space for the secular.
