Artist, educator, and associate professor of glass at the Rochester Institute of Technology, David Schnuckel brings a unique work ethic, upbeat energy, and dedicated fastidiousness to most of the things he does. Be it a slide deck at a conference or an art project, there’s usually more time, energy, and work invested than what might have been required (and you might have expected). His solo exhibition at the Museum of American Glass at WheatonArts, set to open tomorrow, April 3, seems to be no exception. To find out more about this still event that seems to be still taking shape (the opening reception is planned for sometime in June, and the exhibition is running until the end of 2025), the Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet reached to Schnuckel with three questions to help shed more light on this project.
Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet: Can you give us an overview of the work in your upcoming exhibition, “r e d u n d a n c i e s”?
David Schnuckel: As a New Year’s resolution five years ago, I designed a small exercise to make a quick artwork every day during the month of February. One that felt like it was exploring my interests in language, skill, and error in a less labor-intensive way. And it planted a few seeds that ultimately led to a current body of work cataloguing various states of dismissal to one cup subject of specific design.
I didn’t follow the rules of the exercise to a tee back then, but the one that I stuck to was to use my social media platforms as a place to “exhibit” those quick, dismissive gestures. So, I’ve been revisiting those February 2020 online moments over the past few months and translating them into physical artworks for this show.
To do that, one stemmed object of specific design was made repeatedly and each one was then subjected to various degrees of dismissal. In ways both obvious and abstract, all displayed moments in the exhibition catalog an assortment of efforts to compromise the integrity of each stemmed object as it relates to their formality, function, and/or their various associations with prestige. The remnants of these dismissive tactics are what the show is built around. Each moment curated in a series of display cases and housed with the integration of images, words, data, video, and sound to broaden the poetics of each circumstance further.
I like to think of it as the beginning of a library of current findings in my pursuit of a masterful sense of glass wrongness.
Glass: Can you tell us a bit about why you chose that particular title?
Schnuckel: A through-line in the upcoming exhibition relies on repetitive practice. Of leaning into the “what” of repetition on a literal front, but of also figuring out ways to conceptually complicate the notion of doing a thing over and over…and over again.
So that traditional aspect of repetition that is so important in skill acquisition was very much present in the front end of the exhibition prep, simply by making the glass objects. However, the roundabout way to repetitive practice was in committing to the idea of compromising each one, but of doing that in a wide variety of ways. Some gestures ended up quite playful. Some really strange. Some overly cerebral, some overly simplistic.Some light and airy, while others having an unexpected heft. I think there’s something for everybody.
But in each of these cases, the notion of making something or someone redundant in terms of rendering them unnecessary after their original purpose is no longer useful is an additional consideration of the word I'm using as the title that I wanted to also lean into.
Glass: What have you been looking at or thinking about that inspired or influenced your work?
Schuckel: The show is the byproduct of many reference points digested over the past couple of years that have helped expand my interests in things like failure, systems, obsession, chance, change, and dissonance. But what I love most about this exhibition is that I was invited to curate a hall of display cases in the Museum to tease out this interest in what could happen at the intersection of majesty and mishap. And to do it in a way that plays into (and plays with) the formality of scientific and artistic display practices has been one of the most delightful focal points for me in developing both the show idea and the things shown in it.
So the "how" of this new work as an act of accumulating, archiving, and presenting these individual gestures of glass wrongness - and putting them forth in some kind of suit and tie - was no doubt informed by ways I've seeen Josiah McElheny, Nancy Holt, Raven Chacon, Minerva Cuevos, Anne Wilson, and Christine Borland do it. All of which are folks, no matter how tight or how loose, who have translated complicated observations in a visually accessible format where the collected experience is presented in a commemorative, cataloged, and conserved way. But also providing just enough of a curve ball in how they did it to slightly obscure and open up what comes off as obvious at first glance.
IF YOU GO:
April 3–December 2025
David Schnuckel: r e d u n d a n c i e s
Museum of American Glass
WheatonArts
Millville, New Jersey
Website