Interconnected Series
As a child, I have many memories of looking out the window as my father drove into the city to go to a meeting, visit the art museum, or enjoy a baseball game. As he would drive I would survey the landscape, observing the activity throughout each neighborhood and paying close attention to the small details of each structure like a fire escape from a 3rd floor window or the cozy front porches on many older homes lining the streets of Cleveland. While we drove along my imagination would run wild, creating new landscapes that layered the details I saw from different spaces into one. My fascination with architecture and urban landscapes has since carried into my career as an artist. Now as I drive through various neighborhoods doing research, I find myself reflecting on these memories, allowing them to evolve into new compositions, this time in glass.
Each piece I create seeks to depict a recognizable place, a building, a landscape, someplace you may have been before but may not fully remember. They seem familiar, yet far away like they have disappeared deep into our memories. When I approach a new piece, I look at the sheets of transparent glass in a painterly manner, as if each one is a blank canvas that can be used to investigate various ways to apply glass materials. By layering various images together, interconnecting different landscapes through a process that includes digital rendering, painting, drawing, silk-screening, sandblasting, and engraving onto a sheet of glass I develop a landscape that represents these childhood memories. Each step in my process builds a new layer within the piece, allowing me to create a landscape that appears to travel deeper into the material than it actually does. This added depth, which capitalizes on the transparency of the glass, allows me to create landscapes in which some objects are behind others when they should be in front of them. Through the transparency of different glass paints and the building up of glass materials on the outside surface I can further portray my memories of these interconnected architectural spaces and landscapes.
