Artist Statement

Glass, in its nature as both transparent window and physical material, is an ideal medium through which to express the dual nature of art itself. As my lit glassworks show, art is both a window through which we attempt to “read” the world, and a physical vessel whose properties are crucially involved in such readings. We look both at and through these pieces, and the images etched onto the glass surface complicate our looking. Many of them contain text -- language fragments -- more often than not, of poetry. All the images are composed of “lines” (physical, but also metaphorical: of poems, of sight, of thought, of music), which are broken into dots or pulses. Once etched onto glass and lit, the dots form multiple lightpaths, making vivid the shifting perspectives that haunt our readings of the world. 

Recently, in a few pieces, the images have been etched onto the backs of mirrors, which are presented in lightboxes and lit from within. Here the dots of light are set against an opaque, dark background, which seems to recede against the floating, dematerialized lights. These mirror glass pieces provide an element of counterpoint when shown together with my other glasswork. They add another register to the effect, present in all the work, of a vibration between opacity and transparency, looking at and looking through. Such paradoxical looking is at play throughout my latest solo exhibition. In its array of visual “stories,” Storylights celebrates The New York Public Library on its hundredth birthday, that giant vessel of ever-proliferating “lines” and ever-shifting perspectives.