BRAIDED SAND
“Braided Sand. It was a century before they got glass to let light in. Unlock it and reign. A slipper, a coffin, a difference in crystal.”
- The Glass Age
Cole Swensen
Braided Sand explores the relationship of optical technologies to earth materials as a means to consider the natural and manmade processes of transformation that are the bases of photography and other imaging technologies. In doing so the work questions the taken-for-granted use of these materials, juxtaposes human and geologic timescales, and grapples with the poetry of these materials alongside their inherent relationships to extraction.
Digital Video TRT 14:40
Silicon Silica
“Silicon Silica” activate the elemental character of glass and the shared lineage of glass and silicon. If glass was the quintessential material of 20th century imaging and communication technologies, silicon is glass’s 21st century analogue. For “Silicon Silica,” fragments of silicon wafers are embedded into glass orbs. From the enclosed wafer, a plane juts out – the stress of the meeting of these materials. The work speaks to the precarity of our moment, precarity wrought by the stress of human infrastructure on the natural environment, and the threat of emerging technologies in unregulated late capitalism.
below, humming
audio/video loop, flameworked borosilicate glass
Stratalimn
EXT. GARDEN NIGHT
S & O SIT OUTSIDE UNDER A WAXING MOON
S
what if the rock could be a lens
O
and if it’s not a question of if but when ....
excerpt from Stratalimn
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Glass Rocks (size variable)
Superundare
Surround & Overflow
Superundare from the Latin to surround and overflow are kiln-formed glass works that disrupt the notion of the picture frame as a contained, two-dimensional space. The frames in this series are literally opened up, their contents exceed them, or they seem to hold nothing at all. In reducing the pictorial space to the frame itself and rendering that frame in transparent glass, these works trouble what can be framed and if it is only that which is visible.
Kiln formed glass
12”x8”x12”