November 2012 Artist-in-Residence: Andrew Erdos

Headed into his senior year of high school in the summer of 2002, Andrew Erdos came to The Studio of The Corning Museum of Glass to take a glassmaking class with Stephen Powell. Ten years later, Erdos returned to The Studio as an artist-in-residence, having had successful solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally.

The opportunity to study glass sculpture at The Studio as a teen, he says, “gave me the confidence to pursue glass as a career.” He jokes that his plans up to then had been to study finance, as a rebellion against his artistic family. Instead, he applied early decision to art school.

It wasn’t long after graduating with a BFA in glass from Alfred University in 2007 that Erdos began making his way into the art scene. That same year, his work was included in a major group show in Beijing alongside artists such as John Cage and Kiki Smith. It was this event that Erdos defines as the “start” of his professional career and the moment that he came into his own, yet in retrospect he acknowledges that his childhood was “all about art and building installations.”

In Melt From Us, Like the Substance of a Dream, Erdos’ installation at Art Miami in 2011, his silverized, futuristic glass sculptures reflected in a mirrored room, where the viewer was completely immersed in a sensory experience. All of the work in the installation was made at The Studio.  He used video projected on the ceiling to activate the reflective surfaces of the almost alien-like animal forms. Footage of a sunrise over abandoned ruins in the deserts of Arizona played along with the sun setting over the skies of New York City. The contrast between an abandoned civilization and a visual representation of the western world intrigued Erdos, who says that he’s fascinated by complicated relationships: culture and technology, nature and science. His work incorporates glass sculpture, video, performance, and sound to explore these intersections, but not to make a definitive statement. He remains a neutral observer of humankind’s place in the stages of world history.

For his next installation, Erdos plans to include video footage from a recent trip Iceland. He’s intrigued by the geological makeup of the land, which he says, having a high concentration of silica, relates to glass in its rawest form.

In his recent November 2012 Residency at The Studio, Erdos created work for his upcoming April 2013 solo exhibition at the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York City. For the exhibition, he has crafted an even larger interactive installation than what was at Art Miami. Erdos continues to explore with video components in his installations, noting that as video is the controlled transmission of light, and glass is the best material for transmitting light, the two are a perfect complement.

He enjoys working with glass as a material. “There is no reason to make art unless you truly enjoy it. I absolutely love glass. It was a raw energy, a raw power that can’t be found in other materials. Glass is a living organism: it moves, it generates heat, it brings a power that the material provides, not that the artist brings to it.”