Cruising Glass: An MFA Exhibition
June 28th – September 1st, 2023UrbanGlass is proud to present our 2023 MFA exhibition, which is put together biennially and features recent MFA graduates working with glass. This year's artists were juried by matt lambert and the 2023 Curator-At-Large for UrbanGlass, Alpesh Kantilal Patel.
The title for this exhibition, Cruising Glass, honors the breadth of techniques and inspirations within the material landscape of glass. Exhibiting artists for this year are Chuchen Song, Eriko Kobayashi, Kaitlin Santoro, Phillip Murray Bandura, and Timothy Spurchise.
About the Artists-
Chuchen Song is drawn to the transparent and subtle qualities of glass as visitors will see in her enameled, kiln-formed, glass pieces. Her work talks about the perspective of contemporary women, examining the relationship between individuals and the outside world through her lens as a Chinese woman.
Eriko Kobayashi's work is an exploration in how our experiences are connected to everyday objects. She introduces playfulness to the technically demanding glass works that are positive, energetic, and playful to experience. She utilizes forms we encounter in our everyday lives to engage her viewer with the familiar, but also to challenge them to question and rethink these objects.
Kaitlin Santoro is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, glass, and printmaking. Her work explores time, impermanence, loss, and generational trauma caused by cognitive impairment. She creates work that slowly breaks down and shifts, documenting the process and the aftermath to illustrate the fragility of memory over time. Santoro pushes the traditional boundaries of lens based, print, and glass mediums by using incompatible materials, intentionally breaking, or working with fugitive materials.
Phillip Bandura's “Shiny Shit" is a metaphor for struggle and adversity at the same time a symbol of life and light. This installation was inspired by the Covid-19 lockdowns, coinciding with the first semester of his MFA studies at the Alberta University of the Arts in 2020. Phillip believes in the power of humor that allows people to think about, and confront, topics that would otherwise be taboo or too dark to contemplate and discuss.
Timothy Spurchise's sculptures are a visual cacophony of whimsical and eccentric glass sea monsters as a response to his research of the sea monsters found on medieval and Renaissance maps. Tim combines traditional techniques like pulling and twisting colorful glass cane, with contemporary hot glass sculpting. The cane patterns within the bodies of these sea monsters contribute to the material history and to reference the many patterns drawn on their cartographic predecessors.
Read the accompanying written material HERE!
