Statement:
Chandeliers are iconic objects of the Gilded Age, the period of extreme wealth and growth that this country experienced just before the turn of the 20th century. They have provided a context for me to explore ideas of class and wealth in contemporary society. I have managed to draw several parallels between the obsession for collecting that stems from that era and the views our culture currently has about mass consumption and the production of goods and objects. A chandelier references such things as grand parties, huge mansions, Rockefeller lifestyles and old money. In our own disposable time, where mass media moves at the same speed as our attention span for the fate of the plastic rings on our six-pack, the authentic experience of that high life becomes less and less accessible, yet the desire for personal wealth on that type of scale is the backbone of contemporary popular culture, in which I am firmly entrenched. I see these structures as a touchstone that bridges the gap between a collective desire to escape and the greed that fuels our need to consume and cast aside.
Formally, chandeliers are incredibly complex entities, sculptural ecosystems made up of thousands of tiny components to create one glittering object that is dripping with excess. Yet while incredibly excessive and detailed, nothing within the network of a chandelier is out of place; the thousands of glass prisms that comprise the whole can be looked at as individual points on a map. By substituting mundane and seemingly naively handmade objects for crystal, I seek to treat the structure as a map of the connections that occur in daily life, something that is enforced by my layering them in a way that reflects “life” as we know it – messy and chaotic at first glance, but most definitely patterned and ultimately symmetrical, and balanced by cause and effect.