Fools Gold, Phase 2
With great support from the Pittsburgh Glass Center, I proceed glass fragments designed to resemble various minerals discovered in some of the oldest caves on earth. The gestural symbols that are stamped into the glass objects depict images that can be found in numerous caves spanning a 500 mile radius across much of Europe. Today, these symbols are understood as some of the earliest forms of graphic communication and symbolic visual gestures of man. The sculptures created within this project are a nod to the scientific curiosities that inform our understanding of art history.

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling in age-old habit, in mere images of truth.
-Susan Sontag

With generous support from the Pittsburgh Glass Center, I developed sculptural objects that collapse and intertwine allegory, earth science, and photographic theory. These sculptural objects, titled Fool’s Gold, are an attempt to examine historical image -based ideas about accuracy and fact utilizing hand made glass forms and constructed still-life photographs. 

Fools Gold, Phase 1
Photography and representation have been intertwined in an illusive state since the invention of the camera obscura— which offers unarguably one of the mediums most dangerous and powerful attribute. As most viewers trust their eyesight to examine and understand the physical world, the same trust is often place onto a photograph as if the medium itself is directly connected to seeing.

The sculptures depicted in these photographs are drafted to resemble pyrite mineral forms that grow to model a perfect cube. Imbedded into rock bases, the cubes reflect mechanically unnatural characteristics. Made entirely of glass, these hand-made forms exist as 2D and 3D counterfeit artifacts, created to serve as placeholders to remind us that all things in the physical world are designed as reflections of being.