In Pursuit of Transparency

Anna Riley, a slender, soft-spoken 27-year-old with dark blonde hair perpetually tucked behind her ears, is a visual artist specializing in material chemistry and dealing with the ethical questions of the built environment. Her most recent installation, Into the Same Someplace, explores both the production of and emotional interaction with colorless glass. The work is currently on display at Urban Glass, a non-profit arts center in Fort Greene. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Riley has lived in Gowanus since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2014. On Friday she moves to California to attend graduate school for interdisciplinary art practice at UC Berkley.

I studied glass in undergrad and somewhere along the way material sciences became very interesting to me. What’s interesting I think about studying glass as a program, as a department, and particularly at RISD, is that it’s very much like a sculpture department in any other way. You’re learning how to make sculpture essentially, and you’re learning how to exist, how to contextualize yourself as a contemporary artist. But you’re also simultaneously learning really hyper-technical skills about a very specific material. I think that that kind of training towards expertise is also a way of training yourself to ask important questions about the way things are made. How does sand come together as a chemistry and make glass? What chemical and physical technologies were necessary to develop a piece of flawless flat glass? And then also training your body physically to learn how to blow glass, or how to cast glass, or how to slump it in any particular way. The departmental philosophy was, If you come to know one thing so closely – historically, materially, metaphorically –that equips you to ask meaningful questions of other fields. I found that to be very meaningful for me when I was 19 to 22. And then I graduated, and I was still making a lot of work with glass and all of these materials that are peripherally meaningful to glass – ceramics, stone, metals.

I was curious about the chemical composition of glass and I started this sort of DIY project in 2014 melting down sands from different locations. I went on a few residencies to Georgia and along the eastern coast. Sand from different locations has different minerals and so when I would melt the recipes into glass they would come out all different colors, often in the spectrum of yellow, green, blue. Mostly dependent on the level of iron that is in the sand. I had a little kiln that I would plug into a normal outlet that I kept in the back of my car and I would drive around with it. It wasn’t even meant to get up as hot as I was getting it. That was like a learning experiment, an art project, but mostly trying to understand physically what was happening and how does one achieve the transformation from this opaque, solid, earthly stuff into this magical, transparent, molten stuff. And then I was thinking about how incredible it is that we are able to engineer this flawless, colorless material, and what an incredible amount of work goes into making this thing we pretend we don’t look at. Or is meant to not be seen, meant to be a sort of absence.

So at first I thought I was interested in transparency as an abstract idea and disrupting that, that there’s a kind of physicality and chemistry behind transparency and how to make that present. And then somewhere over the several years on this project I became more interested in land use, like thinking about where we’re extracting sand in the U.S. to produce the glass that is our buildings. (Gestures to the window) Like, Is this Texas sand or Kentucky sand or North Carolina? There’s this absence of place and knowledge of place in these seemingly sterile building materials.

From 2017-2018 my mom was sick and that was hard, and it really made me start questioning things. Like do I really want to work in the arts? Is this the most meaningful use of my time? I’m in a very limbo place right now. To be honest I feel much less of an impulse to produce. There’s something quite violent about exposing earth to extreme temperatures, exposing earth to like 2400 degrees of heat, in order to force it out of itself into a new form. So what I once saw as kind of magical, I began to see as very aggressive. That made me not really want to do it anymore, but it took me several years to realize that. There are more beautiful, more calm, and more peaceful ways to negotiate daily work. It doesn’t have to be painful.