Considerations and Ants

Considerations and Ants is showing the work of Justin Ginsberg who has been an artist in residence in S12 this summer. The exhibition presents a comforting and discomforting domestic-like environment, in which objects, drawings, videos, and installations reflect the instabilities and insecurities of our existence.

Ginsberg questions the way we humans act, while taking a closer look at our desire and need to control our lives and our surroundings.

While the home operates as a place of protection and comfort, it becomes a place in which we enslave ourselves through the effort to obtain, maintain, and care for it – through hard work, sacrifice, upkeep, cleaning, and decorating. Ginsberg sees the home as a type of trap in which we contain ourselves, our belongings, and our lives. You own the house and the house owns you.

Ginsberg challenges the perceived boundaries of material and the presumed nature of things, relying on metaphor and gesture to express his interest into the systems and structures we use for understanding the world around us – bringing context to the unknown and chaotic. He pushes both material and idea to extremes, constantly attempting to challenge the definitions that categorize the world. Often, through the accumulation of the smaller individual parts, his work utilizes materiality, to investigate the relationship between parts to a whole. He is interested in this collective gesture, achieved through tedious constructions, exploiting the aesthetic qualities of the material.

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Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Justin Ginsberg spent eight years traveling the country, learning from practicing artists before returning to his home city. He began working for the Art and Art History Department at the University of Texas of Arlington in 2009, while pursuing his Masters in Fine Art Degree there. Today he is the head of the glass area and an Assistant Professor of Practice at the same University, while also pursuing his own creative practice and research. Ginsberg shows his work nationally and internationally, and he has been included into New Glass Review five out of the last six years. His work has been bought by institutions such as Kunstpalast Museum in Düsseldorf, Tacoma Museum of Glass, and The Museum of American Glass.