WHO?
I am a politically and socially engaged hot glass sculptor, mixed media artist, co-founder and operator at Gent Glas, and all around nice guy. I recently competed in and won Blown Away Season 3, Netflix’s competitive glass art reality TV show. I am an American currently living and working in Ghent, Belgium.
WHY?
In our current social-media driven society, we constantly reinvent ourselves, creating content that illustrates who we are. We know that this content is based in reality, but we also know that it is not a depiction of reality, though sometimes that line becomes blurred. This became very apparent to me during the lockdown in 2020 and even more recently since participating in the competitive artistic glass-blowing reality TV show, Blown Away.
As a storyteller, my work is constructed from a series of anecdotes, references, and experiences. While I do draw ties to American pop culture, politics, and social issues, I do not do this arbitrarily. I attempt to illustrate how I see the barrage of consumerism, religion, and politics colliding with depictions of social injustice, secular beliefs, and popular culture. I myself am a product of all of these things. It is not necessarily an attempt at subversion, but more an attempt to reconcile, and in a way celebrate, the absurdity and hypocrisy of our perceived realities.
I work with a variety of materials to create figures and their environments, but I am most frequently drawn to sculpting with glass. As a hot glass artist utilizing mixed media elements, my aesthetic approach and material use is unique in contemporary art. I believe it is important to combine conceptual and critical thinking with beauty and craftsmanship, in order to crate works that engage the viewer and offer a place for dialogue and empathy. Each piece is often inspired by an individual narrative, but together they blend these stories to create a fantastical world based in the confusion of our own reality.
My work is not purely autobiographical, but my experiences and observations are the genesis of my ideas. Each piece is a reaction to a specific event, but is not an illustration of it. I pull from everything around me. My own political and religious views, art, books, movies, family, and popular culture culminate into layers of seemingly random references, multiple components, and a visual overload that mimics our daily experience. While each of the pieces in the submitted work differ in their narrative, they all share a common aesthetic, drawn from classical painting and sculpture, blended with contemporary references to consumer culture. I find this point of intersection key to creating my artistic world.
WHere?
My studio is located at Nieuwevaart 118 A106. 9000 Gent Belgium
My work can be found at:
Habatat Galleries. 4400 Fernlee Avenue. Royal Oak, Michigan.
Gent Glas. Huidevetterken 24, 9000 Ghent.