Racine Art Museum Opens Matt Eskuche: Agristocracy
The Racine Art Museum commissioned internationally recognized glass artist Matt Eskuche to create a new exhibition for its Windows on Fifth Gallery. Matt Eskuche: Agristocracy uses the colour, line, form, and shear abundance of food and beverage packaging as the catalyst to create high end design within the space of RAM’s windows. Exhibition open through July 24, 2011.
In recent years, Eskuche has carefully recreated the trash in his installations using a variety of media, but has primarily relied on Italian glass working traditions in order to produce a startlingly realistic body of work.
For his Windows at RAM installation, Eskuche has expanded the scale and scope of his work – not only assembling the most grandiose tableaux of his trash glass yet, he is also exaggerating details of individual objects and turning them into large-scale compositions of paint, plastic, and light. With this new element of his work, Eskuche challenges how we understand the role of “consumer waste” in our lives-finding beauty in unexpected places and encouraging us to consider the complex web that links preciousness, luxury, consumption, politics, and the environment.
Impressed by the global impact of consumerism on economies, environments, and land and humanitarian rights, Eskuche has used flameworked glass, paper, cardboard and other materials to create soda bottles, fast food packaging, and other items commonly seen as nothing more than “trash.” He recognizes and plays off of the idea that he is recreating objects of mass production out of an unexpected material, by hand and with great labor and skill. In addition, Eskuche studies the design and structure of food packaging and theoretically explores how those factors contribute to how we respond to the products and their aesthetic.
Agristocracy highlights consumptive waste and its former life as a corporately advertised product. Eskuche states, “…from the 90s graphic design of a paper cup that boasts, ‘I am absolutely average!’ to the loud wrappings of the candy and sodas that beg for your attention from the convenience store aisles, their life cycles keep me grossly intrigued.”
Eskuche was originally trained as a metalsmith and began flameworking glass in 1998. He has demonstrated and exhibited his craft throughout the U.S. as well as abroad in Japan and Australia. His work can be found in the permanent collections of several museums including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Racine Art Museum.
Eskuche will return to the museum in March 2011 to modify the exhibition and create a fresh new experience.
Image: Matt Eskuche Agristocracy (detail), 2010 Plastic and incandescent light Photography: Alexander Evans
ramart.org
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