There’s something eerie about Judith Schaechter’s people, currently on view in Super/Natural, an exhibition of the artist’s stained-glass work, at Michener Art Museum in Doylestown.
They seem plucked from Medieval villages, but that’s not it. It’s that they’re deeply distressed. Mouths are open in silent screams. Jaws are clenched in anger. Others just look despondent. The Philadelphia-based Schaechter says her people are in transition, experiencing the negative emotions that make joy, beauty, and happiness all the more pleasurable. She leaves those golden sentiments to our imagination.
The most agonized Schaechterians are Axe-Wielding Maniacs (2021), in which wild-eyed lumberjacks swing blades at stumps, logs, and one another. More a crisis than a transition, it’s the artist’s vivid commentary on environmental destruction and male rage.
Beautiful medium, ugly subjects
Disturbed villagers are only part of Schaechter’s work and in fact, the piece that inspired the exhibition’s title contains no people at all. Instead, Super/Natural (2023-2025) features tightly woven, exquisitely detailed plants, flowers, and insects, bountiful tapestries that are Schaechter’s signature. Super/Natural is also the only work viewers can step into (from 11am to 3pm during gallery hours).
Schaechter gravitated to the medium of glass early in her career, writing “unlike most raw materials, glass is extremely attractive before the artist ever touches it. I found I like to really manipulate it, stretch it, and transform and distort it in unnatural ways. I like to see what possibilities lie in mating difficult emotional ideas with sensuous but cruel materials …. I found the beauty of glass to be the perfect counterpoint to ugly and difficult subjects.”
