Ekin Deniz Aytac, Joshua Davids and Megan Thomas Artist Talks
July 23, 5:30pm
Artist talks are free and open to all ages. Coffees, smoothies, beer, wine, snacks and sandwiches are available in the STARworks Café and Taproom. The Smokehouse Bistro food truck will be on site. Stick around for The Radio live in the cafe following talks.
Aytac and Davids
Ekin Deniz Aytac and Joshua Davids are a collective husband and wife team of artists working in glass. Hailing from Edremit, Turkey and Colorado, USA respectively, this dynamic duo draws from a unique combination of culture, heritage, and experience to elicit profound expression in new works of glass art. They have lived, travelled, and created artwork together since 2014 and are currently enjoying a term as resident artists at a nonprofit glass studio in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA.
The signature body of work ‘Cityscapes’ is a sculptural exploration offering reflections on the nature of self as it relates to the places and things that shape our experience. Drawing on both modern and ancient mythos as well as a meditation on the causal relationship between set and setting, the artists weave a new visual tapestry of form, light, and color. Glass is a unique medium because of both its elemental nature and inherent optic qualities such as refraction, dispersion, transmission, and reflectivity – which speak directly to the movement of light within a material. In this series traditional vessel forms are manipulated into unconventional objects used to evoke landscapes viewed from a unique perspective. A variety of hot glass color applications, diamond cutting, and sand engraving coalesce and together represent the visual rhythms of a world we inhabit together.
The work begins in a glass blowing studio where color is applied to a clear bubble. Each piece is meticulously planned, some colors and patterns are applied to the interior of the bubble whereas others are kept on the very surface. Once the color has been applied, the glass is blown out and shaped into a “blank” form which is eventually cooled to room temperature. After annealing, the blanks are taken into the cold shop where sections of the bubble are cut away and refined into landscapes with a large diamond saw. Finally, a resist is applied to the piece and details are sand blasted into the work, removing surface layers and either retaining or limiting transparency while revealing the range of color throughout each piece. Patterns, windows, and building details complete the cityscape motif and create a rich visual experience. As artists we see ourselves as storytellers, and each detail relays a sliver of information not only relating personal associations, but also providing a foothold for the viewer to make their own connections and find meaning as it resonates with them.
Megan Thomas
Megan Thomas is an MFA candidate in the ceramics area at Utah State University. Her work explores human consciousness as a branch of animal consciousness and how personal collapse and environmental collapse mirror each other. Through drawings and sculpture, she tells stories about how people and animals respond to biological and emotional scarcity. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree of Fine Arts from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. She was a summer staff member at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in 2015.