ARCANE Space is pleased to announce MURMUR featuring a site-specific installation, aerial and kinetic sculptures, prints and drawing by L.A. based artist Stephen Glassman, running from December 7 – 22, 2024. The exhibition launches with an opening reception on December 7, from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM. Glassman will give an artist talk at the gallery on December 15 at 2pm.
MURMUR invites gallery visitors into an intimate landscape where feathers act as calligraphic blades that carve conceptual forms of resilience, migration, and the intertwining of imagination with the natural world.
“Hope is a thing of feathers… Each and every feather piece is conceived as a contribution to a single tumbling swarm of feathers in a global wind. MURMUR is part of a conceptual and ongoing site-specific project celebrating our shared atmosphere and our universal vulnerability as human beings. As a gesture it’s an effort to embed an image of hope in our collective social landscapes.”– says Glassman.
On display are works that include suspended tensile amalgams crafted from enameled bamboo, brass, feathers, sewing needles and light that float ethereally in space; each is a distinct, piece that captures his practice of transforming raw and organic material into resonant spatial strikes. “These works for me evoke the mystery and sensation of a distant wind, or the sudden scattering of birds in a silent landscape … a suspended moment of beauty and foreboding.”
About the Artist: Stephen Glassman /Stephen Glassman Studio creates large-scale, conscious, site-specific artworks globally. In addition to three decades of public commissions, performance and architectural collaborations, Glassman has shown in museums and galleries internationally such as: Santa Monica Museum of Art, Barnsdall Municipal Art Museum, Galerie Born Berlin, Inoue Gallery Japan, Laguna Art Museum, L.A.C.E., Cathedral of St. John the Divine NYC, and Fahey Klein Gallery.
His work is an inquiry of gesture, scale, and social impact – generating the intuitive human gesture on both intimate and civic scales. Notable public works include Flows Two Ways, the 8-story-entrance for Bjarke Ingels’ “court scraper” at VIA 57 West in NYC, and the recently completed Resistance. xAnd Then . . . a floating 45-foot stainless steel feather marking the creation of a 5-mile rewilded greenway in California’s state capitol.
Deaf and unable to speak as a child, Glassman seized on art as a means of communication and self-expression. He attracted international attention creating large-scale bamboo installations in sites devastated in the wake of the Rodney King riots, the Malibu fires, and Northridge earthquake. These works became local symbols of resiliency and a springboard for the large-scale public works he creates today. Additionally his visionary piece Urban Air—turning billboards into floating bamboo gardens—was widely acclaimed and sparked conversations worldwide.
An avid multidisciplinary collaborator, Glassman has worked with Paris Opera, The Moscow Circus, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Jonathan Borofsky, Robert Irwin, Phillipe Petite, Robert Wilson, Gemini Gel, Nels Cline, Eric Owen Moss, Bjarke Ingels, Arup, SOM, Christo, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Marc DiSuvero, Louise Nevelson, and choreographer Sarah Elgart. Recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Nathan Cummings Foundation, NEA, London International Creativity Award, TEDx, and a 2000 Chrysler Design Award nomination, his work has been featured in Art in America, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.
• Exhibition Title: “MURMUR”
• Artist: Stephen Glassman
• Dates: December 7 – 22, 2024
• Opening Reception: December 7, 2024, from 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
• Artist Talk: December 15, 2024 at 2:00 PM
• NEW! Gallery Hours: Thursday – Sunday, 10:30 AM – 5:00 PM (Wednesdays by appointment)
• Location: ARCANE Space, 324 Sunset Ave, Unit G, Venice Beach, CA 90291 (Next to Gjusta Bakery)
