Glass

All language vibrates between transparency and opacity. Words, images, reveal and resist, shine in the light of apparent understanding, occlude, or dissolve into memory-traces, fade and resurface at different times in altered colorations. In a sense, we are always “reading” everything for the first time.

Glass challenges our way of “reading” visual expression. We look through, rather than at a pane of glass. Looking through is really what artists do, negotiating all kinds of borders. Perhaps artists can only provide windows through which to look. Looking, however, quickens an image into visibility, or legibility; and each look is a different look. Given “the sluggish reaction of the human eye,” in W.G. Sebald’s words, we see only an “afterglow” — the ever-changing now of the world leaves only its “phantom traces".