Matt Eskuche: Agristocracy
August 6, 2010 - July 24, 2011
Windows on Fifth Gallery
The Racine Art Museum commissioned internationally recognized glass artist Matt Eskuche to create a new exhibition for its Windows on Fifth Gallery. Matt Eskuche: Agristocracy uses the colour, line, form, and shear abundance of food and beverage packaging as the catalyst to create high end design within the space of RAM's windows. In recent years, Eskuche has carefully recreated the trash in his installations using a variety of media, but has primarily relied on Italian glass working traditions in order to produce a startlingly realistic body of work.
For his Windows at RAM installation, Eskuche has expanded the scale and scope of his work – not only assembling the most grandiose tableaux of his trash glass yet, he is also exaggerating details of individual objects and turning them into large-scale compositions of paint, plastic, and light. With this new element of his work, Eskuche challenges how we understand the role of "consumer waste" in our lives-finding beauty in unexpected places and encouraging us to consider the complex web that links preciousness, luxury, consumption, politics, and the environment.
MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Agristocracy (detail), 2010
Plastic and incandescent light
Photography: Alexander Evans
This exhibition is made possible by: Presenting Sponsors – Karen Johnson Boyd and William B. Boyd, RAM Society Members, S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., The Hearst Foundation, Inc., and Windgate Charitable Foundation; Gold Sponsors – Racine United Arts Fund, The Helen Bader Foundation, The Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation, and Wisconsin Arts Board; Silver Sponsors – Osborne and Scekic Family Foundation and Real Racine; Bronze Sponsors – E. C. Styberg Foundation, Inc., In Sink Erator, Midwest Contemporary Glass Art Group and Target
