NEW YORK— Heller Gallery is pleased to present Accumulation, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of work by Matthew Day Perez.
Matthew Day Perez’s new body of work focuses further on his interest in the mutability of material and ideas related to accumulation, piling, or collecting. Starting from the transformation of discarded material through happenstance and design, each work is tethered by heat, time, and gravity to emboss, shape, or freeze particles into the glass. The formal aspect, the shape, is akin to a canvas to spread and mount material into form. Ten fused and cast glass wall pieces are included in the exhibition.
Accumulation is defined as “the acquisition or gradual gathering of something.” Day Perez notes that “it is sometimes slow and unrealized or, at times, fast and overwhelming’; and that his ‘new works are physical manifestations of accumulated and dispersed materials – used as metaphors for identity, skilling, growth, and mutability.” Matthew Day Perez received a BFA from Illinois State University and an MFA with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work was included in the 2019 exhibition New Glass Now, a landmark juried global survey of the state of contemporary glass, at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY, which later travelled to the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Day Perez is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, the National Endowment for the Arts’ Renna Arts Scholarship, a U.S. Department of State Grant for new works, a Lois Roth Endowment Award, and has completed residencies at the Corning Museum of Glass, Creative Glass Center of America, Pilchuck Glass School, and Bullseye Glass Company. Day Perez has lectured at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA and at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. A serial creative entrepreneur, in 2018 he founded FagSigns, an inclusive neon studio based in Brooklyn, NY, which strives to erode barriers to the creative sector. In 2021 with Dorie Guthrie he co-founded Shiny Sparkle Studio, a Brooklyn-based, boutique glass fabrication facility specializing in custom work for art and architecture, and its education and special events arm, Shiny Sparkle Labs, that aspires to bring the art of glassmaking to everyone.
For 50 years Heller Gallery has served as New York’s leading dealer specializing in contemporary glass sculpture and design. The Gallery nurtures emerging artists and also represents a prestigious roster of international artists and designers, whose practice incorporates glass as a creative medium. A resource for public institutions and collectors worldwide since 1973, numerous artworks have entered the public collections in the US, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Corning Museum of Glass, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Toledo Museum of Art, and museums worldwide, including Victoria & Albert Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Louvre, National Gallery of Australia, the Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Hokkaido Museum, and the Shanghai Museum of Glass, as a direct result of Heller Gallery’s exhibitions and advocacy.
