Evening Dress with Shawl

LaMonte is well known for her hauntingly beautiful draped female figures that evoke the fragmented bodies of classical antiquity as well as the white marble statues of 19th-century American neoclassicism. By using translucent colorless cast glass, rather than opaque stone, LaMonte gives her images a sense of ghostliness and spirituality. One of LaMonte’s primary subjects is the dress, which is always life-size, whether it is for an infant, a young girl, or a woman. The artist explores a variety of styles of clothing in her work, from stiff and frilly Victorian dresses to idealized classical drapery. Her fashion choices reflect changing notions of beauty: how women view themselves, and how they are viewed by others. Casting glass on such a large scale is difficult. LaMonte worked her way up from small castings to medium-sized pieces. In recent years, she has worked in the Czech Republic. She uses art students and herself as models for the interiors of her sculptures. The process of moldmaking is complex; separate models are made of the bodies and the clothing. The interior and exterior forms are articulated in the final casting in glass. LaMonte says: “For 10 years I have been working with the female figure in absentia in an exploration of beauty, a celebration of symmetry and physical harmony. Although beauty might look different in different societies, it is always about pleasure. The absent figure is important to me because it tempers the undemanding pleasure of beauty with insinuations of loss and mortality.”