The “Fabricated Weird” series from the early 1980s signaled a new direction for Marquis. These pieces, which Marquis calls “visual notes,” were quickly assembled from the things that surrounded him in his studio, such as a broken piece of glass, a chunk of obsidian, and pieces of murrine cane.
The solid white murrine “spout” on this “pitcher” is actually a word cane that reads, “Chuck the duck / says life is / mostly hard work.” This was one of Marquis’s first pieces to incorporate an object from his collections: a souvenir painted bottle filled with sand.
Place Made
United States, CA, Berkeley
Physical DescriptionBlown multicolored glass, filigrana cane, murrine cane, air twist, ground, cut, bonded, addition found object. Irregular sculpture in the form of a stylized non-functional pitcher; section of multi- colored twist cased in colorless with elongated pointed air inclusion has rounded top, cut or ground flat base, inscribed "Marquis #F.S.W. 19" on lower edge, and two ground spots on opposing sides; adhered to one polished spot is a "spout" consisting of a length of opaque white "Lord's prayer" millefiori with minute black inscription: "Chuck the duck/says life is/mostly hard work"; adhered to opposite side is an ovoid loop of a length of multi-colored millefiori cased in colorless cane; twist is adhered to a "potato" section of blown opaque light yellow cased in light brown with scattered indented "eyes", six evenly spaced ground areas to which are adhered radiating short lengths of square multi-colored millefiori cane with flat bases and four-sided end points, each cane is of different colors and configuration; "potato" is cut or ground flat where it joins the color twist on top and on the bottom where it is adhered to a "found" commercially produced paperweight of unknown origin with a flattened top, weight is hollow colorless glass filled with a sandpainting depicting a desert mountain landscape, open bottom is filled with a white "plaster". Provenance
Provenance information not currently available online. Please check back in the coming weeks.
