Mary Chevali, a visual artist with an MFA from the Maine College of Art, was awarded the 2021 Ron Desmett Memorial Award for Imagination with Glass. Chevali has been making networked glass sculptures by flameworking 3mm rods of borosilicate into shapes that resemble mountains. Thus far, the shapes have been independent of each other. Through the Desmett residency she plans to create an assemblage of shapes that work together to create a large mountain range or series of connected shapes. By layering glass and put shapes inside of larger shapes she’ll create more intricate landscapes. My work draws from landscape. I wander and observe the world that I live in and pull images and forms from my memories to create drawings and sculptures that reference mountains, bluffs and other land formations. I isolate and reimagine to create self-contained forms. I create a new imagined reality to exist in. I am interested in my place in the landscape and much of my recent work deals with the scale of my body and the circumference of my reach. I make drawings with pencil or gouache on paper, site specific earth drawings, sculptural installations with yarn and large drawings with knit wire. The forms that I make are translucent, hesitant, and vulnerable. They are fragile, lacking the strength to support. There is a certain handmade, drawn quality to some of the forms, giving it a slightly hesitant or delicate look. When formed into a grid or net however, the glass rods form a structure that has the tensile strength to expand outward into large scale forms. The work oscillates between disappearance and infinity. I make sculptures from networked glass rods that are fragile in contrast to a mountain. About Marcy Chevali Marcy Chevali is a visual artist with an MFA from the Maine College of Art. She has shown work in galleries and artists’ spaces including Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Queens Museum of Art, AIR Gallery, Gallery Aferro, and Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and with organizations such as Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, ABC No Rio, Project for an Empty Space, 4heads and Peculiar Works Projects. She was awarded an artist grant from the Queens Art Fund in 2015. In 2016 she attended Playa Artists Residency and in 2017 was a fellow at the Edward Albee Foundation. In 2021 her work was exhibited in a solo show at Aicon Gallery in NYC. In 2018 she participated in the Bead Project at Urban Glass in Brooklyn. Since then she has been flame working, making both jewelry and sculpture with soda lime glass and borosilicate.