Jeremy Wong, The Commons, Presented by the Walker Art Center at Northern Spark 2019. Photo: Jayme Halbritter.
Foci ASI Installation Credit: Bryan Ethier
Arnold” Credit: Alison Feik
For more Northern Spark 2019 images, visit our flickr album here.
Foci Minnesota Center for Glass Arts and member artists will create a wall of interactive neon. This will bring the voice of our community to a broader audience of art appreciators. This will present neon in a new venue that can demonstrate the resilience of the material.
Participants may stand in and around the neon characters, photograph themselves, and post to social media. These will be characters that could be seen as roots of communication. Patrons will interact with the neon and post the images to social media to show “we are here,” and renew their own complex relationship with the tangible present and virtual communication. Each neon form will regenerate ideas about how the audience reads, considers, and finds meaning through our current ways of communication.
The second component to the installation will be a portable neon bending station. Here we will have artists demonstrating how neon tube is bent in shapes. We would like participants to walk away with a physical artifact of their experience. At the bending station participants may select UV sensitive beads and watch as an artist seals the tube. This will be a ‘portable’ neon tube that can be relit as it is charged with light.
Bryan Ethier is a mixed media artist working with materials such as wood, glass and neon. He is an instructor of hot casting and neon at Foci Minnesota Center for Glass Arts. His thirty-year experience began as a clothing designer followed by joint ownership of a successful neon design/fabrication sign business.
Chad Holliday is the Director of Studio Operations at FOCI Minnesota Center for Glass Arts. He received a BFA from Emporia State University and an MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is a Fulbright recipient and his work been acquired by The Museum of Glass and The Museum of Applied Arts – Prague.
Jon Rees is an artist/educator and currently Education Coordinator at Foci Minnesota Center for Glass Arts. His career began in Architecture. Later finding the medium of glass for artistic expression. Rees’s sculptural work draws on topics related to architecture. He has taught at universities and studios across the US and exhibited nationally and internationally.