Jason Chakravarty & Jennifer Caldwell

Vetri Glass: Jason Chakravarty and Jennifer Caldwell »

Since 2012, Jennifer Caldwell and Jason Chakravarty have maintained a critical, conceptual, and technical dialogue about their individual work, which easily evolved to collaborative pieces. Over the past couple years they have mounted multiple two person exhibitions which included work that challenges the experimental process specific to each of them. Within these compositions, Jennifer included flame worked components that represented her mastery of the process while Jason’s contribution was cast and blown glass. Jennifer utilizes a lot of sea life while Jason includes imagery that man uses to access the sea. IE Man and Nature in Nature. The finished compositions have been published in glass magazines and generously collected.

Jennifer Caldwell AKA Umphress creates work that draws inspiration from her environment. Born and raised in California, she began working with glass in 2000 while living in Hawaii. Caldwell now lives and works in Kingston, Washington, where the Pacific Ocean continues to influence her work. “Although my inspiration comes from the ocean, I am most intrigued by capturing movement. I try to emulate the movement of sea life in a simple contemporary form,” says Caldwell in her personal statement.

Jason Chakravarty began incorporating glass through the use of neon into his sculpture in 1998 while attending Arizona State University. He was employed for four years at a commercial neon sign shop where he learned technical fundamentals of the neon process. In 2002 he began illuminating hot shop forms and kiln casting glass while attending graduate school at California State University Fullerton.

Thematically much of the work is drawn from travelling to teach, exhibit and demonstrate glass. Road trips back and forth across the US and visits to Japan, Cuba, Honduras, Turkey and Israel have sprung series of work inspired by objects, places, and people they have met along the journey. Wooden docks in the Honduras, sunsets in the southwest, and forest lakes in upstate New York have crept their way into many of the pieces. Objects ranging from antique scuba diver helmets to barnacle covered buoys serve as points of departure inviting viewers to explore their own personal connections to the familiar forms we encounter in unfamiliar places.

Jennifer Caldwell
360.860.1458
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Glass is, at once, fragile and strong, beautiful and dangerous, full of movement and static.  These paradoxes lend themselves to speaking of conflicting ideas that inevitably accompany each other in the mind and throughout life’s experiences. 
 
Humor, whimsy and imagination are a cathartic aspect of my studio practice that allow me to address more serious emotions from a place of playfulness. In my work, I observe objects from the world around me and convey ideas by identifying aspects of these object that I am drawn to.   Color, form or historical meaning become a point of departure and focus while aspects that make these objects live or function in reality, become secondary or completely denied during the creative process.  In this way objects from my experience become beautiful, yet un-functional, or are combined in a way to see the paradoxes through which I view the world.  
 
Working with the constant motion associated with hot glass forces me to intuitively engage with the material creating a constant collaboration between the material and myself.  This is a connection that happens between my conscience and sub-conscience, my mind and hands, the motion of the material and my own emotions, resulting in a physical object that conveys my essence. 
~Jennifer Caldwall

Jason Chakravarty
714.369.4132
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Jason Chakravarty is a mixed media, object maker living in Arizona and Washington. The majority of his work is cast and blown glass and incorporates neon for illumination. Glass can be anything; thick, thin, shiny, dull, rough, smooth, transparent, or opaque. It is the only material that can capture light. While material and notably glass are important, his emphasis is within the narrative. His most recent works are semi-auto biographical and reflect on human relationships and personal observations.