OPENING: Flameworker Matt Eskuche adds plastic to the mix in new museum exhibition

Matt Eskuche, Agristocracy (detail), 2010. Plastic and incandescent light. photo: alex evans.

Flameworker Matt Eskuche has made a name for himself for his close study of plastic water bottles, milk cartons, and tin cans, all of which he reproduces with absolute accuracy in opaque white borosilicate installations that explore the excesses of our disposable culture. For his latest exhibition, opening next week in a set of exterior windows at the Racine Art Museum in Racine, Wisconsin, Eskuche has expanded his scale to fit the massive 10-foot-high by 16-foot-wide display spaces inside six windows. To take advantage of this large-scale opportunity, Eskuche worked big. Really big. He’s installing a lot of glass. And he’s also bringing plastic.

“I am currently going in several new directions with the trash, given this incredible opportunity to expand the scale of the work,” he writes on his Website. Of special interest will be his use of vacuum-formed plastic, which he has used to create panels that are joined together to create geometric multi-sided forms suspended and illuminated from within (a detail is illustrated above). A chandelier with plastic panels of trash relief patterns.

“It’s a combination of what he’s beeen doing with glass, and taking it in a new direction in plastic and light,” Lena Vigna, Racine Art Museum curator of exhibitions, told the Hot Sheet in a telephone interview. “The work will unfold as you walk along the window space. ... it will be Matt’s largest tableau, his most grandiose tableau, with similar subject matter but utilizing very new material.”

Though incorporating plastic, Eskuche will also be presenting work in the medium of glass. With the previous Racine installation being devoted to the work of Therman Statom, we asked Vigna if there was a special emphasis on glass for the window exhibitions.

“There’s certainly a desire to emphasize glass in different aspects in the institution as a whole,” Vigna says, though she added that artists working in other materials such as sculptor Diane Simpson‘s textile works, have also been featured. Still, she speculated that glass was particularly well-suited to the type of installation the windows offered. “There is something about light and shadow and the fact that this is an installation that is a year long, so it allows for change in its atmospheric aspects, noting differences in appearance in daylight and darkness. There are special properties of glass , the way Therman or Matt uses it, that plays with that dynamic well. Glass stays in our minds as we think about who do we talk to next.”

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