Stephen Glassman

Country where you live:

City where you live:

Statement : 

This new series of chandelier works are an amalgam of bamboo, brass, enamel, feathers and light.  At the onset of this pandemic wherein we were all thrust into varying states of confinement, I experienced a sparked state of enforced privacy and productive contemplation. Triggered first as studies in migration – of birds, peoples, viruses – they ultimately manifested as a suite of urgent and intuitive structural gestures embodying fragility and hope, chaos and control, darkness and light. They reflect the spirit of a dear friend who passed at the start of this year.  Jim would often say “Hope is a thing of feathers.”

Bicycle Dream
1996 Muji child's bike, bamboo, acid washed aluminum, light
Migration
feathers, brass, enameled bamboo, light
We (dig)
A donation to the Ron Finley Gangsta Gardener project. There is no “They”…there is only “We”. Painted shovel, bamboo, feathers
Maelstrom
12'x12'x3', bamboo, chalk, charcoal, twine, wire A study of collapsing bamboo scaffolds as meaningful civic gestures
Hope is a Thing of Feathers
feathers, brass, enameled bamboo, light
Bio: 

Stephen Glassman’s art practice is an inquiry of gesture, scale, and social impact - the intuitive gesture on a civic scale. Drawing is at the core.

His work first  gained international attention creating free-form, large scale bamboo installations in urban sites devastated by uprising and disaster. The works came to serve as symbols of resiliency and connectedness within their communities and throughout the city.  They were art for art’s sake, in a social context, and became the springboard for the permanent large-scale works he creates today.

Deaf and unable to speak as a young child, art was Glassman’s  primary means of communication and expression. He spent years traveling the country as a circus, street and agit-prop artist, eventually setting roots in what was then the  creative outland known as “Dogtown” ... Venice Beach. It was here that Glassman’s signature work took root - physical gestures of mass and velocity pulled directly from  the urban landscape.  Often formidable in scale, the work extends organically from a site and is distinct in its ability to intersect place and form to create meaning. Glassman's work "dazzles in slo-motion [and] creates a bracing, humanist kind of spectacle ... that actually draws the viewer into the frame instead of alienating."(David Cotner, LA Weekly)

England
Bristol
England
Lincoln
United States
San Francisco
United States
Gibsonia
United States
Los Angeles

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