Return to Presentations and Events

Glass as Performative Practice

Video and Lecture by Alexander Rosenberg

July 1, 2016, 7:30 p.m., Bearnstow Main Hall
(admission free)
Download flier (PDF)

Alex Rosenberg has studied at the Pilchuck Glass School, the Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and the Corning Museum of Glass. He holds a BFA in Glass with a concentration in Creative Writing from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visual Arts Program. He currently lives in Philadelphia.



Drawing (2008) — steel, video, animation, pocket projector, blown glass.

This piece was created for a drawing show. I was interested in the act of glassblowing as a tool for generating a drawing. I made a video of myself blowing a “low-bowl,” and used motion-tracking software to map everywhere in the frame that the glass on the end of the blowpipe went. I then superimposed an animated line that followed the path of the motion.


I work with a wide variety of materials and processes, but my approach to all of them comes from a studio practice based in a single material, glass. It is with this narrow area of expertise that I enter into a larger conversation with other disciplines and media. Glass is both archaic and high-tech; it records sound, movement, and other forms of information; it is a material well suited to preservation and observation, proto-cinematic devices, and fiber-optics—a literal window and a figurative one to the digital world behind the screens of our electronic devices.

I produce traditional vessels as part of this practice, reverse engineered from photographs in books and objects that I find in museums, but the results are not present in my body of work. It is the performance of making that I am more interested in. Glass vessels are a tangible recording of a body moving through space and to make them is a form of historic research. To make them perfectly is to reenact a series of movements made by another person hundreds—sometimes thousands—of years ago. This kind of closeness is appealing to me and is the basis of my interest in history.


Hyperpyrexic (2014) — hand-blown soda-lime and borosilicate glass, etched found sheet glass, collected bound and photocopied texts making up “fever library,” candles, nichrome wire, Variac (variable autotransformer), mild steel, plywood, electronic compo­nents, dry gin, wintergreen oil, shadows, heat.

I came to the gallery to perform the distillation process in the evenings weekly. This shifted the space to a laboratory-like forum for discussion. Curious discussions arose about the work, the processes, the works in the library and other facets of studio practice