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The Manchester Journal
Article Launched:01/19/2007 09:05:21 AM EST
Friday, January 19
Anita Sandler, Special to the Journal

Christine Glade: An unconventional artist

Christine Glade is a creative spirit, free thinker, digital goddess, unconventional, multi- dimensional, a multi-disciplined conceptual artist . and a web designer. She might leave a sign on a telephone pole asking "What was the last lie you told?" She might leave a box by the side of the road asking you to respond to the box and the experience of finding the box. She wants to involve you. To make you think and be a part of the experience. She also takes microscopic pictures of "nasty things" like insects legs and pond scum . and she makes them look beautiful. Her "favorite place in the world" is Don Dorr's tractor museum on Route 30 where you can find Christine photographing rust . one of her favorite backgrounds for her hybrid and digital art.

Her medium is digital. If there's a pixel involved she's happy. Her love affair with the computer started in Connecticut when her brother got his first computer which she quickly took over. She speaks lovingly and passionately about her affair with the computer, especially her Mac. She even collects them, or at least can't throw them out - she has 14.

Glade lives to create. She wakes up at 5 a.m. to see what excitement the day holds. What will involve her, speak to her, get her going? She is an unconventional Vermont artist who doesn't paint cows or landscapes. She makes art for art's sake, because she needs to say something or something needs to be said. She believes that "art doesn't have to just hang on walls ... that art is beyond two or three dimensions. Art should be not only visual but it should surprise, create emotion, make you think." She redefines the concept of what you might think art is and just by discussing her ideas and passion she is creating art.

Behind all this wild and crazy creative energy and spirit lives a professional Web designer with a successful business called Web Design Central. Glade has a corner office in Advanced Imaging in Manchester. Among her clients are local businesses, artists and inns. When she begins a project she asks herself "what can I do to make it exciting?" Her client list is long and impressive.

Christine has made her life's passions work for her. Her stock photography and Web site business support her creative life. She is professional and proud of her work, but what she really loves is the process of creating and letting go.

Digital photography, video, microscopy, hybrid arts, assemblage, multi-media installation, conceptual pieces and public art, a play or a poem, the world is Glade's 4-dimensional canvas. Her choice of medium is dictated by "whatever the message demands to engage the viewer," she said. Elements of the unexpected are pivotal to her purpose as creator. Her goal is to tap into the viewer's experience. At that moment.

For her conceptual art project "Found A Box" she hid 100 identical 4 by 4 white boxes in public places throughout southern Vermont. Attached to each box was a tag reading "For: You...If you are holding this box you are its intended recipient / www.foundabox.com." In each box was a small item such as a key, a recipe, and old telephone wire. The purpose of the project was to surprise, get a reaction, generate curiosity. Another element of the project was the message that the gift is never in the box, it's the excitement and the experience of getting the box and opening it that is the gift. She wants to "put the art in your hands."

There's no telling what might end up in her hybrid and digital art work. Almost all her pieces include photography and have included tractor rust and crushed soda cans as well as microscopic images of blood, pond scum and insects. Photomicroscopy - photography using a microscope - is a growing portion of her work. She finds beauty and art in the details... that unusual elements work together magically to capture attention and draw you in to the mystery of "what is that." The design elements and integrity of her work goes beyond the what it is, to looking at "real art." Her interest in photographing strange things almost got her picked up by the Granville Rescue Squad when she was spotted on the ground while trying to capture the dew on a blade of grass. A passerby called the EMT's to report a seemingly lifeless body on the ground. It was Christine.

She is an unconventional guest and an unconventional artist. When bored at a recent family wedding she decided to "have fun" and photographed all the men in their ties from the neck down and created a beautifully designed and photographed book she calls "Family Ties" which she presented to the newlyweds. Her sense of humor and honesty also shows up in her writing. One of her books, "Stools," is a small collection of poems about the people and time spent on stools in bars and coffee shops or "wherever people sit and spin" in places as near as Mrs. Murphy's, Mulligan's, Sherries, and The Barn, or as far away as coffee shops in Cape Town, South Africa and Montreal, Quebec.

Glade is also passionate about her involvement with "mail art" as a form of expression. Artists sharing art is a movement started in the 1950s by Ray Johnson that involves artists from all over the world who share art through the mail. Participating artists send one of a kind artwork as postcards or paper plates - whatever the creative muse dictates and will get through the mail.

Glade's collection of mail art is an amazing gallery of one of a kind postcards from artists all over the world.

"It's good to be me," Glade said.

Her husband, Jack Glade, Director of the Tutorial Center, loves what she does and is supportive. He gave her a special camera to shoot her microscopic nasty things and make them beautiful. She said he seems to know the piece of equipment she needs before she even knows. Married for 20 years, the couple moved from Connecticut to Vermont in 1988. They are working together on the creation of The Northshire Digital Arts Center. Their vision for the center includes space where the digital artist - and those who want to be - can find skilled instruction, collaboration, exhibit space and fellowship in an atmosphere that understands and supports new media, including photography, fine digital art, multimedia/video/interactive work, digital storytelling and tech crafts.

The Glades are still looking for a space and are working on their business plan.

Glade is currently exhibiting in the following projects: Draw me a Terrorist, Jeroen Teunen's Project; Postcard International, Art Council of Greater New Haven Small Space Gallery; Snap to Grid, Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts; Traumbegilde (Dream Room), Madgeburg, Germany. She was invited to participate in an upcoming exhibit called Do Not Bend Fold or Mutilate at the Washington Pavilion of Arts and Science in Sioux Falls, S.D. Her work can also be seen on countless Web sites and in on-line exhibits as well as on her own Web site. She is teaching digital photography this month at the Tutorial Center.

Anita Sandler is an artist, musician and freelance writer who lives in Manchester. For comments or story ideas contact nitasarts@yahoo.com.