A month of making sets stage for faculty's solo exhibition
Elizabeth Lamark
"thumped" is among the featured pieces in "redundancies," a solo exhibition featuring Associate Professor David Schnuckel. It's a study of dismissal to the physicality of a cup subject after three taps with a mallet.
It all started as a New Year’s Resolution.
David Schnuckel, associate professor of glass, made a personal commitment to take a few brief moments to make a new artwork every day throughout February 2020. It was an exercise in exploring language and skill — and a way to inform his practice through acts of “failure.”
Those quick projects became the starting point of a body of work highlighted in “redundancies,” a solo exhibition featuring Schnuckel’s refinement of that project. It is on view through Dec. 28 at WheatonArts’ Museum of American Glass in Millville, N.J.
“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 exhibition statement reads.
The featured pieces are a conceptual interpretation of Schnuckel’s contemporary vessel-making and writing practices.
“Relying on advanced methods of glassblowing, one stemmed object of specific design is made repeatedly, and each iteration is then subjected to various degrees of dismissal,” the exhibition statement continues. “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.”
Photo by Elizabeth Lamark
This piece, titled "denied," is Schnuckel's study of dismissal to the cup subject's quality of value by way of low-brow judgement.
To properly investigate the intersection of fluency and failure, Schnuckel had the hired assistance and expertise of RIT glass students and alumni to execute his ideas. He also worked with Nathan DeFreest ’20 (furniture design) and Talia Drury ’24 MFA (furniture design), fine arts studio MFA student Caitlin Smith, photographer Elizabeth Lamark, and the staff, led by Andrea Fernandes, of RIT’s Imaging Services Lab for photographic prints. The collaborations were supported by the Charlotte Mowris Fellowship in RIT’s School for American Crafts.
Schnuckel also used his research principles and findings to lead RIT’s glass program through a semester in which students learned how failure and error can fuel ingenuity.
“If we create healthy art habits to help keep ourselves looking for a broader understanding of something we’re interested in,” Schnuckel said, “we’re going to feel a deeper sense of fulfillment in how we understand that relationship over time. That’s where this thematic approach to teaching within studio art is useful: it asks us to rethink what we thought we already knew so well.”
Elizabeth Lamark
"encased" studied a glass cup's exposure to physical space in three different ways.
Schnuckel is an artist whose ideas pivot around glass, a writer who wanders through issues prompted by glass, and an educator who challenges students to explore their questions and curiosities through glass and glass-related thinking.
His work and research is regularly featured in New Glass Review, Corning Museum of Glass’ annual survey of innovative contributions to the glass field, as well as Glass Quarterly, a leading publication contemporary glass (he was the cover story in fall 2021). He has also been nominated for the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.