Photos by Elizabeth Lamark

Caught in a committed relationship to glass that is as motivated by fluency as it is
informed through failure, David Schnuckel’s devotion to technique and the conventions of “doing things well” are prompted by a provocative and equally thoughtful exploration of “(un)doing things well.”

The series of artworks in the exhibition redundancies are conceptual applications to a vessel-making practice extending from ideas intermingling notions of skill, error, and language. Relying on advanced methods of glass blowing, one stemmed object of specific design is made repeatedly, and each iteration is then subjected to various degrees of dismissal.  In ways both obvious and abstract, each display case within redundancies catalogs an assortment of efforts to compromise the integrity of each stemmed object as it relates to their formality, function, and/or their various associations with prestige. The remnants of these dismissive tactics are also housed with the integration of images, words, data, video, and sound to further deepen the resonance of each dismissive circumstance; collectively serving as a library of studies in pursuit of a
masterful handling of wrongness.

Out of curiosities with conflict and how human vulnerability parallels material
vulnerability, redundancies both contemplates the lure of idealism and relishes in the poetics of mishap, the flawed, and the faulty.

The pieces housed in the Museum of American Glass are displayed for the first time as part of a new, ongoing project; an exhibition revealing the beginning of a vision towards a singular artwork composed eventually of twenty-eight individualized gestures.