I saw a call on social media to cast a reality television show with glass blowing, and honestly, it sounded awful. When I get nervous about the future, I apply to a lot of stuff. I had just left a job that wasn’t working out, and I didn’t have many prospects. How did you end up on Netflix’s “Blown Away”? “Pretium Certum Constitutum” (2016) by Alex Rosenberg (Courtesy photo) Twitter is where I get a lot of my Jewish discourse. There are some good rabbis that I follow. My folks are currently involved in a synagogue I’m not, but I’m big into Jewish Twitter. I have made candlestick designs that I like a lot and have given to friends, specifically for Shabbat candles.Ĭan you tell me about your Jewish background? It enables me to test designs in a meaningful way, and that helps me grow my practice. I’m grateful for this notable increase in my audience. I haven’t quite gotten there yet, but I’m sure there will be an opportunity to do so. I just got a request to create a seder platter, and I was excited to figure out how to do it in a way that would fit in with the type of glassmaking I like to do. I haven’t yet, and there’s no particular reason except I’ve been doing more commissions because of the show. What is it to practice historical research through the lens of this material? I’m frequently asked what it’s like to practice architecture in a glass-like way. If I worked in carpentry or jewelry, or something else, I would still be doing it in a glass-like way. For example, I see the world through the lens of this material. That being said, all of it is influenced by what I call a studio practice that’s based in glass. My projects aren’t driven by a particular process or material, per se, but more by the topic I’m working with. So these ideas of optics and visual transformation, the notion of alchemy, collecting and preserving specimens, seeing the unseen-these are all things that are inherent to what glass does as a material and what drives my process. There are themes specifically related to what glass can do. That piece shows some of the things that I’m very interested in with glass. When you filled your lachrymatory, there was a lens magnifying the face of your beloved dog from a photograph. One of my favorite things you made on the show was called the “lachrymatory viewer.” As you noted, a lachrymatory is a small vessel historically used to collect tears as part of a mourning ritual. “Lantern Room” (2016) by Alex Rosenberg (Courtesy photo) The ability to put those things together and experiment was important to forming the artistic practice I have today. I thought there was art that I knew and there was this process that I like. I discovered how to incorporate the material into making artwork I hadn’t conflated the two before. I always thought I would be a painter, but when I saw there was an option to get a degree in this process that I like so much, I was in. I did finally get a high school diploma, and then I went to art school, where there was a glass program. I took the class, and I was terrible at it, but I fell in love with the process. He was coming home with these very unsophisticated blobby glass things, but I was very excited by the fact that this process, which I always thought of as pretty industrial, could be accessed with just an individual human hand. I was living on the West Coast and sharing a room with a guy who was taking classes at the local community college. Through a long and not interesting sequence of events, I dropped out of high school. Like many younger people, I didn’t have a full idea of what that could be. I was always interested in art and being an artist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |