Questioning the current definition of what constitutes a glass artist, Anjali Srinivasan and Yuka Otani introduced—via their blog How Is This Glass? and a related exhibition, the “post-glass artist”—artists at the crossroads of glass and new/alternate media. Instead of using glass to support a primary narrative or decorative aesthetic, the artists chosen by Srinivasan and Otani critically investigate the various issues intrinsic to the craft medium: the nature of its materiality, transparency, optics, electricity, ductility, and phenomenology. Challenging existing discourse, these “guerilla interventions” became the project’s main focus, and the authors responded to this work both critically and creatively. Their blog, with its hyperlinks, streaming media, and open feedback loops, is the appropriate expression of the sense of urgency needed to foster artistic practice in a world of non-linear modular tools and alternate ways of making data and seeing matter. How Is This Glass? is a site for visual artists who are inside and outside the studio glass community to exchange their ideas and methodologies of approaching glass in non-linear ways.
Anjali Srinivasan is a visual artist who received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2007. Her digital video publication, Experimental Puffy Glass casting episode 2, was shown at the International Festival of Glass in Stourbridge, UK, in 2008. Her article “Glass Art in India—Lost and Living Traditions” was published in the Glass Art Society Journal (2005).
Yuka Otani is a visual artist, glassblower, and an independent curator who received her MFA from RISD in 2008. She directed Performance Night at TAP Room, featuring fifteen experimental art performances by students from various departments at RISD in 2008. She also curated Eidolon–Exploring The Ephemeral at Three Rivers Art Festival Gallery in Pittsburgh in 2007.