Josiah McElheny

After studying at RISD, McElheny apprenticed to master glassblowers in both Sweden and Italy. His work of the past decade unites extraordinary skill rooted in the history and craft of glassblowing with a conceptual framework or mode of present­ation that belongs to the post-modern art world. In Studies in the Search for Infinity, McElheny
re­created Venetian Renaissance latticino glass­ware, characterized by a combination of milky white threads or canes with clear, transparent crystal. The delicate geometric patterns vary, but they have in common a central vanishing point so that the decorative lines seem to converge or disappear as the perspectival illusion of endless space. The glassware display is accompanied by a framed text written by the artist in which he provides basic information about Renaissance painting and the relationship of perspective drawing to optics, mathematics, and spiritual perfection. In the sec­ond paragraph, McElheny speculates about how Venetian glassblowers contributed to Renaissance thought in their search for infinity and thus created a parallel history.