All the way back in May I began preparing a large hanging composition for one of the more exciting and intimidating opportunities I've had in my career to date: a group show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The curator, there, Emily Zilber, had seen the "Illuminated Sculpture" chandelier last year at SOFA Chicago, and thought something similar might be a good addition to a category of her upcoming show "Crafted: Objects in Flux." Including craft-based artists who make objects with their chosen medium and present them in unconventional ways, the show broke works down into three subsets: the Re-Tooled Object, the Performative Object, and the Immersive Object. The chandelier, composed of many reconfigurable glass parts of varying degrees of optical "density" and texture, hanging from the ceiling instead of parked on a pedestal, seems to have conveyed requisite elements of potential "immersion".
It's the optic qualities of glass that have given us telescopes and microscopes. Their lenses, with their reflections, refractions, transmissions, and distortions, have given us the evidence of our place in the universe as well as the foundation of all modern computer technology. Their shapes and surfaces bend and transform light from solar photons into knowledge. Making the piece for Boston, having the occasion to further explore these phenomena, becoming physically and theoretically immersed in them, I wanted to experiment with another technique- mirror. Despite the unfortunate side-effect of constantly running into your own reflection, the mirrored surface does more than just reflect. It gives the viewer of the mirror the opportunity to move through the surface. The distortions of the mirrored blown-glass shape draw us into an altered, alternative version of reality, further compounding optical density and tampering with the veracity of our perception.
