Jon Kuhn Glass

there is something mesmerizing about light the way it insinuates itself into mind and memory premier and Agha Matisse and Monet each has sought to capture its elusive qualities brewed and sought in a truth in giving form to light John Kuhn plays with light creates with it captures it holds it deep within intricate cores of the clearest crystal where it glows with cool transcendent energy and color and then he releases it to bounce around the room and a joyous spinning dance people say a lot of things about my artwork most often they describe it as beautiful on spiring breathtaking every so often an individual gets the spiritual connection and that's when it's most rewarding to me there are kyun cubes and kyun circles wings and columns ribbons of glass and stainless steel and clusters of slowly turning pendulums whose reflections reach out and draw the surrounding space back into the work such artistic exuberance is fast becoming the trademark of this North Carolina glass sculptor Kunz as his work is often called are found in influential museums and galleries throughout the US and increasingly the world John Kunz recent exhibition at Charlotte's Mint Museum of craft and design proved a thoughtful and stunning surprise to those who encountered it one of the really great things for us in taking this show was that it offered our visitors a completely new and dynamic experience the gallery was designed as a virtual canvas upon which the light the movement the reflections the color were to be both stationary and moving you became part of this much larger experience that's completely unexpected fumes early pieces were connected to the earth grounded in traditional glassblowing techniques this is a timeline progression of the work that I've done over the past twenty eight years I was a student when I made this piece a little vase form blown glass phase form didn't blown glass for three weeks about a year later was making these paperweights and you can see where I cut through the outer surface to reveal the inner world inside that inner world idea continued in the blown glass with these chemically treated vessel forms where I created this very geological very organic surface on the outside cut through it to reveal landscape image on the inside the work eventually morphed into something quite different as kuhn experimented with cold glass sculptures a pagoda like piece more western columns cubes and newer forms such as these what's interesting about John's work is that he's really expanded the potential of constructed glass sculpture beyond I think what anybody had ever anticipated and he continues to amaze us with his talent with his vision with his ability to captivate us Koons most recent work explodes with light and color and nowhere was that more evident than at the mint these pieces were all in some way some kind of breakthrough for me and they were all very important to the exhibition at the Mint Museum but the piece that was probably one of the most significant breakthroughs was this beast entitled golden dusk there's 12 wedges that all fit together to create a circle and then once they all were all fit together then the whole thing was ground on a lathe into a circular form every step of the way was new it was something that we'd never done before this piece the double ribbon on one ribbon I had it was all made of 140,000 different pieces of glass they're all ground polished and glued together the other component was made of 78 pieces of glass and it's very clear it's very transparent the idea of scope and scale has been very much on the mind of John Kuhn at this point I'm very interested in how I can make sculptures that can fit in large buildings there's all kinds of ideas about how to make that happen this very large sculpture took over two and a half years and 20 people a 20 percent team to make weighs a ton and a half we made the whole thing to stainless steel the glass the motor assembly the computers the this granite like base it put it all together took a tremendous effort and was a great challenge but I'm very proud to say that with the help of my team we were able to do this I am the artist but the work could not happen without each and every member of the team that works with me artisans craftsmen engineers machinists glass technicians when an artist vision is larger than he can create with his own two hands that he needs help there are all relates back to the vision the initial vision that the artist has the way these sculptures are made is to start out with these strips of colored glass which are glued to a piece of five millimeter thick glass which becomes after series of steps of cutting grinding polishing gluing becomes the line panel which then the cross-section of a number of line panels is a dot panel this dot panel becomes the beginning of a sculpture the dot panels eventually become what kuhn calls core material the burst of suspended color at the heart of many of his pieces they come together overtime in the studios glue room the glue is being applied to the bottom piece of glass and then the piece with the core material is going to be placed on top of this any air bubbles or lint is being picked out of glue make sure it's perfectly clean glue joint the second piece is placed on top using an incredibly transparent museum-quality epoxy developed by Texaco chemical companies some 20 years ago it's hard for most people to imagine the intricacy of what goes into this fork intricacy yes and lots of time anywhere from three months to more than two years for each piece and then there's technology in the bowels of Kuhn studio on the northern edge of winston-salem's downtown Arts District a collection of industrial-strength machinery stretches the artists creative horizons every single one of the machines in my studio expands the scope of my work allows me to do more than I can do by hand please industrial Blanchard grinding and polishing machines have been adapted to grind and polish glass the gantry saw is used because it is computer controlled and gets a more precision cut faster than what we can produce by hand was originally designed for cutting granite but I've adapted it for my purposes there is no other glass studio in the world that uses one this lathe was adapted from a machine shop use for grinding and polishing big chunks of glass into circles these are my tools these are my paintbrushes considering the scope of John Coons present work and the richness of his imagination what might this artists paintbrushes create next to the illumined mind road Emerson the whole world sparkles with light you

Channel: Our State Magazine

Views: 1,155,539

Rating: 4.876842 out of 5

Keywords: Our State Magazine, UNC-TV, North Carolina, Glass Artist

Id: UnBGzuK-fCU

Length: 10min 53sec (653 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Mr_Smartypants]

Reminds me of Jack Storms's work.

[u/tehsma]

Looking at the works in the first half its pretty clear that a LOT of work goes into creating his glass sculptures. They are stunning!

The guy seems like... Um... How to say it? A bit like a lab technician or something, kinda dry and atypical as far as artist types go. But I guess it makes sense because his works have a sort of Industrial / technological vibe to me. Like something you would find in the lobby of Cyberdine systems corp from terminator.

[u/do_pigs_lay_eggs]

narrated by: Jon Kuhn