Small Wonders

GLORIA VANDERBILT'S TOUCH OF GLASS

Gloria Vanderbilt—once the small, dark focus of a 1934 custody battle that obsessed the nation—grew up in a glass house. Now she is making them. Think of a terrarium in which objects and not plants (deathless things such as wishbones, dice, dolls' heads) all breathe the same secret. Imagine a reliquary arranged by a ghost. Vanderbilt calls her works "dream boxes," a name suggested by writer Joyce Carol Oates, who is an admirer. Twenty of these beautiful boxes will be on exhibit at K.S. Art in New York beginning November 1, and, yes, their lineage descends from the master, Joseph Cornell. But where his boxes are little proscenium stages, Vanderbilt's are see-through Plexiglas cubes, prismatic, with refractions and meanings that glance, twist, and crystallize as you move around them. Eternity, loss, fate— these are Vanderbilt's subjects, Victorian in their palpable spirituality. By five every morning, Vanderbilt is in the studio (stocked with spun gold and silver stars and thousands of assorted things, it's like a flea market in Heaven). She works until three, a long day. In her lifetime she has been a painter, actress, designer, writer, collage artist. The dream boxes, however, are clearly something more, or, rather, everything at once. "I feel that it's what I'm meant to be doing," she says. What's it like to be deep inside this work? "Home," she says, and leaves it at that. —LAURA JACOBS

LAURA JACOBS

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