MFA, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA., Glass, 2007
BFA, Emily Carr University of Art andDesign, Vancouver, Canada, Glass and Sculpture, 2005

Visit Robert Geyer's personal website.

Robert Geyer is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Glass area at Bowling Green State University School of Art. He did his MFA at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia focusing on Glass, Sculpture and Installation. His BFA at the Emily Carr University in Vancouver was centered on Mixed Media Sculpture. 

 

His current art practice is based on making objects and installations that utilize the distinct properties of glass to create a tension between sculptural form and subtle phenomena through the interplay of light, color and visual perception. Robert uses Blown, Cast, Fused, Flat and Found glass to create a unique visual experience for the viewer

 

In 2006, Robert received the Tyler School of Art, Rome Art and Culture Fellowship. He received this award to further his art and ideas relating to the Arte-Povera movement and critical theory.

From 2005 -2007 Robert was the operator and curator of the Barber Shop Gallery in Philadelphia that exhibited Faculty and Graduate students from Tyler School of Art.

 

 

 

The idea of the found object modified into artwork began nearly a century ago when, in 1913, Marcel Duchamp produced Bicycle Wheel by mounting a bicycle wheel on a wooden stool, thereby canceling the function of either object.  Commercial glass windows comprise Robert Geyer’s found material, but his modification of the material transforms it into an artwork not exactly by changing the meaning or purpose of the found object but in fact by stripping it to its most fundamental form, activating the phenomenological potential of glass.  By cutting away the frame, he removes its designated function.  By exposing its cut edges, he lays bare its inherent fragility and immanent hazard.*  By creating units of multiple cut pieces of recycled glass with varying tints and thicknesses, he builds constructions that become metonymic mirrors of the skyscrapers they were originally produced to service.  

Referring to commercial glass as the ‘envelope’ that laminates most contemporary architecture, Geyer removes it from its industrial context but reconfigures it so that it dramatizes the transformative character of glass, “referencing the very reason for its manufacture.”  He adds, “When lit like the giant windows in Gothic cathedrals or the lobbies of modern office towers, the structures I build do not simply reflect their surroundings but create mysterious, sophisticated, three-dimensional shadows.”  

Because glass is a prodigiously yielding medium for light that allows a surprising variety in projection, reflection, and refraction, Geyer transforms not just the found material but also any setting in which it is placed.  The muscular in the architecture and structure of his constructions become agencies for the enigmatic because light is never fixed.  The subtlest change in ambient light that may stream in through a door or the mere presence of bodies can alter the saturation of light and interplay of shadows.   With incredible simplicity, Geyer’s handling of glass coaxes out of it the more organic nature of the alchemy that produces it.  Geyer transforms the industrial with a play on both the tension in, and the subtleties of, glass—variably referred to as liquid earth, vitrified air, that amorphous solid that is cool skin on buildings akin to the limpid skin of water.

-Carina Evangelista Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art
 

*It bears recalling that Duchamp’s masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923), incurred damage in transit.  Rather than replace the glass, the artist opted to laboriously repair it, declaring afterwards that the 

constellation of cracks made it “a lot better …a hundred times better”—that “it’s the destiny of things.”  Robert Geyer’s artist statement emphasizes the “phenomenological possibilities” that make glass an ideal medium, from which we can draw an affinity 

to the poet Octavio Paz’s description of Duchamp’s fascination with the “four-dimensional object and the shadows it throws.”
 

 

Robert Geyer comes from the world of glass and is an Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University . Usually associated with the decorative arts, glass, independent of its craft-life, has at times figured prominently in 20-century art history, from Duchamp’s Large Glass to Robert Smithson’s Nonsites and Displacements. In its transparency, reflectivity and crystalline composition, glass carries a symbolic weight as a material substitute for mind and vision. In a realistic realm it also serves as the insulating skin for the buildings of modern cities and the literal transmission means for fibre optic communication, both of which are reference points for Geyer’s glass sculptures. In a series that he calls Architectural Studies,he has made stacked, building like forms from cut sections of commercial glass windows and, as installation works, put them into mysterious dialogue with their own evasive cast shadows, a conversation between the rationalist form of the structure and the unpredictable images of its shadows and reflections. For the Alberta Biennial, Geyer has made corner and wall works from uneven sections of glass rod that carry faint traces of coloured pigment that amplify in intensity in the reflections and cast shadows of the works on the adjacent walls. These leaned bundles of glass are colour studies that track the ephemeral effects of the light that passes through the rudimentary clusters. “They become…a formless murmur of light and colour,” he says, but it is a formlessness that speaks to bounty and the effects of Alberta’s sharp, crystalline light on the landscape. For Geyer, such light offers its own structure and its own meaning as an enveloping space and beauty. His art samples its omnipresence.

 

Richard Rhodes, Editor of Canadian Art

 

Curriculum Vitae

 

 

2005-2007 M.F.A.  Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, U.S.A. 

2002-2005 B.F.A.   Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver, Canada.
 

 

2011-present Assistant Professor, Glass Program Head, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 
 

2007-2011         Full time Faculty, Alberta College of Art and Design. Calgary, Alberta,

 

2008                 Alberta College of Art + Design, Marion Fund Award for Innovation and                                     Research in Teaching.
 

2005-2007          Director and Curator, The Barber Shop Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

 

 

2012 Crystal Wonderland 2, TRUCK Contemporary Art, Calgary, Alberta, January-                           February, 2012
 

2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta,                     May-August, 2010
 

2009 Breakthrough Ideas in Global Glass, Ohio State University Art Space, Columbus,                   Ohio, July-October, 2009
 

2009 Crystal Wonderland, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington,                         Delaware. April- May, 2009
 

2007 Constructions, CAA New York Area MFA Exhibition. Hunter College Times                               Square Gallery, New York City. February 1 ‚Ä√¨ March 26, 2007

2007 Crystal Wonderland, Temple Gallery, Philadelphia, Pa. May 2007
 

2007 Hot Glass in the Blue Grass II. Loudoun House Gallery, Lexington, Kentucky.                           March 24 ‚Ä√¨ May 13, 2007
 

2007 Real American Hot Dog 2, the Barber Shop Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
 

2004 Glass and the Bigger Picture Exhibition, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery,

New Orleans, Louisiana. June, 2004. Blown Glass

 

2004 From Hands to Lips Drinking Vessel Exhibition, Canadian Clay and

Glass Museum, Toronto, Canada. June- August, 2004. Blown Glass

 

2004 Simon Fraser University Biennial Glass Exhibition, Simon Fraser

                University Gallery, Vancouver, Canada. September ‚Ä√¨ October, 2004. Cast Glass

 

A w a r d s

2011               Medici Award, Bowling Green State University

 

2011 Alberta Foundation for the Arts Project Grant
 

2010 Alberta Foundation for the Arts Project Grant
 

2009 Alberta Foundation for the Arts Project Grant 
 

2008         Alberta College of Art + Design Marion Fund Award for Innovation in                                         Teaching and Research to develop Living Glass History Project
 

2006 Rome Art and CultureFellowship. Tyler School of Art, Temple

        University, Philadelphia, PA
 

2006-2007 Graduate Academic Tuition Assistantship and Stipend, Tyler School of Art,                               Temple University, Philadelphia, PA

2005          British Columbia Arts Council, Senior Award for Visual Art. Victoria, Canada
 

2003-2004 All Institute Tuition Scholarship Award, Emily Carr University, Vancouver, Canada