I’m interested in representations of black people by white people, particularly those that were prevalent in my youth. This body of work [with glass] is kind of an exorcism, an exorcism of these representations that have little to do with you I am, but have had a great deal of impact on my psyche—and I would imagine many people’s psyches—as to who they are.

I’m definitely not a formalist, but I’ve had very diverse interests and influences.

In developing this [glass series] I started digging around trying to find other kind of relationships, concrete relationships that gave it some historical grounding. Blackness was a commodity at one time, just like oil has become a commodity. Slavery was a commodity.

I’m interested in glass for its properties, the fact that it’s always a liquid. Making these forms, they still look very viscous, very liquidy, for lack of better words. And I’m interested in beauty, but always beauty in the service of meaning. I also like the representation of liquid on a large scale, on a grand scale. I like to think of it as over the top, operatic, opulent. In opera there’s this incredible drama, full of pathos and tragedy, so extreme you can’t escape being drawn in. Glass, because of its associations, calls for this kind of subject matter. To me, this is just what makes sense for this material.

The tricky part with using glass is that it’s very seductive. No matter what you do, it’s a beautiful thing. I am very interested in beauty, but I use beauty in service to meaning. So that’s another thing I like about glass: it’s a challenge. You can’t just let yourself get swallowed up by beauty.

I’ve been more and more thinking about the notion of blackness and what is black and what really does that mean? And should that be something in the 21st century? Should blackness have as much meaning as it does and how negative and how positive is it? And what are the other connections to this term and to this color and is it something that is so reductive that it’s a problem; or, it is so reductive that it sort of makes blood rush in a certain way so that it’s positive, or can it be all these things at once?

[Posted by Justin on behalf of the artist.]