C. Matthew Szösz: Traversing Unpredicted Landscapes
An artist and educator, C. Matthew Szösz has established a practice that revolves around experimentation and investigation of techniques and material, with a focus on understanding the ways in which physical objects and events transform into intellectual and emotional experiences. He operates and is interested in the space that exists between design, craft and fine art.
Wrote William Warmus in Glass, the UrbanGlass Art Quarterly: “So each Szösz project represents a unique inquiry into outcomes driven by curiosity, inspiration, and technical opportunity. Attempting to wrestle these diverse series into unified categories is to limit the creative variation and diversity of each, to try to name the style. Perhaps it is best to list some of his most important investigations, summarize the findings, and enjoy the artifacts of Szösz’s subversive and yet disciplined and meticulous process.”
Since receiving his MFA(Glass) from Rhode Island School of Design, Szösz has been recognized internationally with awards such as the Irvine Borowsky Prize, the Jutta-Cuny Franz Prize, and a Tiffany Foundation Grant, and has completed numerous residencies in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. He enjoys working as an educator, and has taught at ASP Wrøcław, Reitveld Akademie, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Washington, University of Hawai’i, Pilchuck Glass School, Penland School of Crafts, and Bildwerk Frauenau and others, and has lectured and given numerous workshops around the world. He is the founding member of the curatorial group Hyperopia Projects and was Executive Director of Public Glass, a non-profit public access studio in San Francisco.
Szösz’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in private collections and public institutions in the United States, Australia, Europe and Japan, including at the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, the Renwick Gallery/Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, the Toyama City Museum of Glass, Toyama, Japan, and Het Glazenhuis, Lommel, Belgium. His career has allowed him to meet and work with friends, colleagues and collaborators across four continents and dozens of institutions. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife, Anna Mlasowsky.
Recently, Szösz completed an IASPIS residency in Sweden, administered by the International Arts Grants Committee there. Later in the year, he will work at a residency in Lisbon organized by Maria Morales Lam, through her studio Lo Invisible. In the next two years, he will be visiting a pair of universities in China and teaching at Pilchuck Glass School in the summer of 2027.
In between, Szösz is finishing up a commission for SeaTac airport that has been the main focus of his practice for the past three years. The project, titled Jonah, converts a part of SeaTac’s north main terminal, an escalator well and a surrounding mezzanine, into a highly abstracted version of Jonah’s whale. The installation has been broken into two parts – a larger, more architectural part that creates two articulated glass walls that form the body of the whale, which was installed in December, and a more sculptural part that is scheduled for installation in September – a suspended, lighted piece that roughly corresponds to a whale’s mouth holding a Pearl.
Says Szösz: “There are a number of metaphors and associations between the Jonah story and air travel, and I particularly liked the idea of the whale being a meta-space, something that has a long tradition in stained glass. I was also attracted to the apocalyptic overtones of the Jonah story in view of the current American political and environmental situation.”
In contrast, the personal objects and videos Szösz creates are the result of performance-based experiments documenting a deep knowledge and unbridled desire to allow the material to lead him. The artist describes his practice as “an attempt to maximize serendipity, and to allow a project to be guided by material and consequence, arriving, in the end, in an unfamiliar and unpredicted landscape. A successful project should not only be surprising but should also achieve an identity independent of the artist, and to at least some degree, escape his control and mastery.”
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