MURMUR
DATE: December 7th, 2024 - January 5th, 2025
LOCATION: Venice Beach, CA
GALLERY: Arcane Space
"As an artist, a sculptor, an architecture-adjacent placemaker, and a thoughtful citizen of society and ecology, Stephen Glassman has always been a bit obsessed by the seeming paradox of lightness and strength. Whether in literal building materials or as a metaphor for the planetary and human spirit, his most famous exegesis of these ideas have been his ultra-durable, aesthetically delicate bamboo works. But in a new site-specific installation and a series of aerial and kinetic sculptures, drawing, prints, and hovering chandeliers, Glassman takes up the feather as his muse. From the serenity of the floating glide to the anxiety of being blown away and lost, the hand-built material wonders were, says Glassman, “first sparked as an inquiry into concepts of collapse and migration (Of species, peoples, atmospheres…) They embody frailty and hope, chaos and control, construct and gesture, darkness and light, collapse and resilience.’”
— Los Angeles art critic Shana Nys Dambrot, 13 Things LA
These suspended sculptures ultimately manifest as chandeliers – the territory of spectacle in our private architectural space. In the end they are meditations on migration. We have all migrated here.
Each and every feather piece is conceived as a contribution to a single tumbling swarm of feathers in a global wind. It is a conceptual and ongoing site specific project celebrating our shared atmosphere and our universal vulnerability as human beings. As a gesture it’s an effort to embed an image of hope in our collective social landscapes.
PROJECT CREDITS
Artist: Stephen Glassman
Curator: Morleigh Steinberg