The Corning Museum of Glass has chosen Tom Patti for the 2015/16 Speciality Glass Artist-in-Residence, an award granted for a unique opporutnity to work with cutting-edge formulations of glass. The residency will allow the artist freedom to work in an industrial laboratory with the assistance of the museum's glassmakers, research scientists, and curators. Patti is the second selected artist in the invite-only program after Albert Paley. Beginning this month, the residency will take place in the research and design facility known as Sullivan Park, where Patti will have the opportunity to experiment with patented glass formulations from the Corning Archives, giving him the chance to further explore the medium. Known for his innovative techniques that push the physicality of glass, Patti will use the residency to further explore how temperature affects the material. Since his primary concern is to conduct research, he told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet that he is going into the process without a specific creative agenda, but to simply further his knowledge of what glass is capable of doing.
In the past, having used fused stacks of sheet glass into which an air bubble is introduced, Patti has set himself apart from his contemporaries by embracing glass associated with industry to engineer his conceptual pieces in the medium. Working with salvaged float glass, Patti created his signature small-scale works, such as Asahi Lumina with Bronze and Mirrorized Disk (1993) and Clear Lumina with Azurlite (1992), which mirrored the urban architecture where the factory glass was originally installed. With the suspended bubble, his works presented a way of seeing the cubes from inside out, adding the aspects of transparency and time to the abstraction in his work. Patti's works provide a taut contrast with the "soft, melty, organic aspect of glass" that was in vogue at the time, as he explained in a Corning Museum article. His approach has taken on an investigative perspective that seeks to reveal technical properties within glass.
His more recent projects have focused on an impact-resistant types of glass, as well as dichroaic glass, which breaks light into spectral components, and he has used both in his larger-scale installations. Spectral-Luma Ellipse (2000) is an architectural piece integrated into the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a glass door entrance which optimizes natural light into incandescent light. Causing reflected light to shift from transparent to translucent, it may reveal itself to be clear and colorful to one pedestrian going into the walkway and then appear in a spectral range of hues depending on the direction he/she approaches the object.
"I’ve tried to create the glass as a window into a space, I tried to give space content," Patti said in a 2008 "Meet The Artist" lecture at Corning, explaining the way he works against and reinforces properties in glass.
"If you hold that object at hand’s length, in all these planes—these horizontal planes—will appear to extend beyond your own personal space; you can go into the object."
In an email interview with The Hot Sheet, Patti said he will use the Corning residency to explore how different kinds of glass are affected by temperature change, specifically, temperature ranges not available in artist studios. With a curiosity that remains undimmed, he is going into the lab with no preconceptions except to search and ask questions.
"For me, Corning’s Sullivan Park is a gateway to a new universe of ideas and questions and I share Corning’s long-term confidence that scientists and artists have a common belief in the impossible," Patti said. "We both search for the unknown. To study and work at Corning will be to explore material and ideas in a new way that disconnects me from my studio and takes my hands off the material."
For Patti, glass remains limitless in potential for form because of how it serves as a catalyst for imagination as he engages with it as a scientist and as an artist: "It is an ambivalent relationship – a friend and adversary - revealing insight and inspiration."