#NGG The Future Of Art

Due to a change in #NGGG planning, #NGG wanted to catch up with past #NGG winner Morgan Peterson! As the winner of Season 4 of Netflix's Blown Away, Peterson has had an extraordinary year filled with exciting developments and artistic breakthroughs.

Last December, during our #NGG presentation, Morgan gave us a glimpse into her Born of our Culture/American Excess presentation. Now, you have the unique opportunity to hear directly from her during this Q&A. Morgan has joined the ranks of elite artists pushing the boundaries of glass art, and we're proud to showcase her work alongside other Blown Away stars here at Habatat. If you haven't already, I highly recommend catching the latest season of Blown Away—it’s an absolute must-watch!

My work is based on experimentation and process, focusing heavily on craftsmanship. I mainly utilize molds in my practice, primarily utilizing kiln-forming techniques such as casting, pate de verre, and slumping. I enjoy exploring technical limitations and finding ways to stretch or accommodate them. I am interested in how light, color, texture, and shape interact and manipulate materials, their functions, and their appearance.

Currently, my work revolves around replicating everyday objects in glass and ceramics. Some of the best textures, colors, forms, and surfaces are found in our daily lives and are generally overlooked. I aim to highlight these details through precise replication and, in turn, provide a greater appreciation for the ‘unremarkable.’

Elena Esposito is originally from Harbor Springs, Michigan, where she grew up spending time with her family outdoors. Since she was young, Elena has always loved tools, getting messy, and being in a work environment. She received her BFA from the College of Creative Studies in Craft & Material Studies with a focus in glass in 2023.

Not Grandma’s Glass is an innovative exhibition/competition conceived of by Aaron Schey of Habatat Detroit. The exhibition has featured 12 artists annually since its inception in 2021. All of which have been selected for their commitment in their practices to pushing the conceptual, technical, and aesthetic boundaries of glass as an expressive medium.

It is an incredible honor to be invited to exhibit alongside 11 other impressive artists working in glass. The selection of works I have chosen for this online presentation encompasses a full year of my sculptural journey as I began the first year of my graduate studies at Illinois State University. The pool of objects below are sourced from several of my sculptural series, as well as my catalog of one-off’s. Collectively they touch on a diverse range of topics including phenomenology, ontology, physics, mathematics, the ego, craft, and the experience of time.

Join a Habatat-Zoom this Saturday featuring June 2024’s #NGG artist Igor Frolov. Frolov was born in Petrozavodsk, Russia, and resides in Kotor, Montenegro. I am excited to visit Frolov this Saturday, June 1st at 1:00 p.m. ET. He will share multiple bodies of his work with us including his grey glass creations, abstract forms, and AI-inspired. Frolov owns and operates Frolik’s Hot Glass Studio in St. Petersburg, Russia, and explores numerous facets of art including, glass, mixed media, and painting. Recently, he has been exploring the use of AI to create images of glass art and is interested in how these AI images can bring attention to real glass artworks.

Hi! I’m delighted to be the featured artist for Not Grandma’s Glass for May. So thank you Habatat Gallery, and Aaron for organizing!

I am a glass artist from the UK, and create patisserie in glass. Below is a video about my Good Enough to Eat collection, and further details about my practice and process.

I have been working in glass for a number of years, but more recently my practice developed from fused work to casting after I had the opportunity to assist at Colin Reid’s studio, and began to develop my own ideas. The collection explores the rituals and interaction between people, and has set me on an exciting technical exploration journey with glass, and how I can manipulate such an opposing material to appear as something else. I love the metaphor this creates, as not everything is always at is appears.

In the future I would love to build upon this and explore scale, and work on further installation pieces.

I will be talking about my practice on the 11th May 1pm ET time via Zoom, I’d be delighted to see you there – you can RSVP here.

You are invited to join me as we welcome April's #NGG: Art of the Future Maria Koshenkova. Koshenkova's recent body of work, titled Drive Me Inside, was produced during her residency at the College For Creative Studies, nearby in Detroit Michigan. I had the chance to meet when she was in town and I found myself genuinely impressed by both her and her artistic creations.

Koshenkova merges her Eastern European background with Scandinavian aesthetics in her sculptures, which often explore the raw essence of humanity. Each series of sculptures follows a conceptual framework, with the method of creation rooted in the specific situation that inspires them.

Rather than adhering to a single style or technique, the artist selects techniques based on the idea, resulting in visually diverse yet conceptually connected works. They seek to transform existing objects or phenomena into new poetic forms.

In the time that one knows Christopher Day, one learns how beauty and horror in his practice exists, it borrows the seductive qualities of glass to make work that comments on issues of race with narratives that range from complex inquiries to unflinching social vignettes. Day makes objects that are more than racially defined, reflecting multiple dimensions of identity and experience.

Day is a mixed race artist who uses his craft to navigate what it means to be black in the UK. And also, white. While he might be both, he sometimes feels like he is not enough of either. His new work, deeply personal in exploration, are often self-portraits that explore what it means to be biracial in the UK by playing on stereotypes and aspects of generalisations. Constantly aware of the complexity of race, his solo show, 'Blown, Bound and Bold' deals with the complexities of internalised racism as well as the difficulty of establishing an identity that isn't just stratified but overlooked by linear definitions of race and heritage.

Bringing together a very personal selection of work, the exhibition aims to create a sense of community and encourage discussion. Every detail including the unwieldy lines, the ensnared glass bubbles, copper cages and the visual weight of material is so imperfect, restrictive, distorted, a conscious acknowledgement of confronting the subject matter visually. An exhibition such as this is, as much as anything, an exhortation to face history and explore the present - as the Black Lives Matter movement actively reshaped our view of our recent past and future contingencies.

Day's professional engagement with art began quite late, but his past has always been enamoured with the expressive power of working with his hands (as a plumber).

With the artist there is insistent questioning on the history of the slave trade in the Eighteenth Century, reactive almost twitter-like in brevity the finished glass-blown pieces are acutely patient in awaiting response.

Traditions of art and history, Day's work exemplifies this immersion of personal preoccupation, a unique compositional line of enquiry and an emotive invitation to viewers to engage with that enquiry. The resulting observances confront viewers with a synthesis of new and often shocking realities.

Day's work is created in response to his own conflicting feelings of belonging as a man of mixed-race, which are compounded by the limited representation of diverse narratives by and of people of colour in art history and popular culture.

Day's practice investigates complex topics and social tensions through the use of the personal; often creating works that hold colour and light and the potential of how these incredible objects reflect the subtle and not-so- subtle integrations of ideas into individual lives and identities.

My works are about the insecure feeling I have when interacting with people based on everyday anecdotes. I share intimate emotions through the narratives of my glass sculptures. Using life-sized glass characters, my work manifests the anxiety generated by the fragility of trust and intimacy in human relationships. The medium of glass allows me to demonstrate the interdependent relationship of life. The nature of glassblowing requires close teamwork. Based on the logic of human coexistence, the further we are away from our community, the harder it is for us to feel peace and satisfaction. With the help and trust of other glassblowers, I create characters expressing my inner self in this safe community. The form and gestures of the characters evoke the audience's empathy.
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Our impression and interaction with an object determine our perception and how we associate with the world, which influences me when deciding the character's form, gesture, and color. The character is usually in children's size, a metaphor for our inner child. The body gesture and actions of the character express certain emotions with subtle details. The clear part of the character represents our consciousness. The color part brings in emotion and guides the audience's focus when looking at the work.

I am a custodian of stuff, preserving its heritage and safeguarding its legacy.

As such, I spend a lot of time wandering through flea markets, thrift stores and my personal storage units, looking at seemingly unimportant objects and wondering what past experiences these objects have endured. The stories these objects could tell. I wonder why people hold on to certain things. Is it nostalgia of the past or were they simply utilitarian?

This series of sculptures deals with nostalgia in objects. Each of the parts I used as models were found in a variety of places; each having its own inherent history. Through a lost-wax casting process, I transfer the seemingly insignificant objects into delicate crystal keepsakes. Each vintage truck, serving as a vessel, hopefully delivers a different thought on the subject of nostalgia in objects, through color, form and the contents of the truck.