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MICHAEL JANIS

Craft, Multimedia, Painting, Public Art, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

As a child of Asian/Latino immigrants, my art is deeply rooted in the stories and struggles of my family's journey towards assimilation, serving as a constant wellspring of narrative exploration and self-discovery.
In my figurative artwork, I explore the human form, but not through a conventional lens. Instead, I deconstruct the body into abstract shapes and unsettling angles, aiming to evoke a sense of disorientation and unease in the viewer. Through the use of light and shadow in my glass panels, I create a paradoxical sense of depth, dimensionality, and weightlessness. The transparency and reflectivity of glass further add to the ambiguity and fragmentation, inviting viewers to engage with the work from various angles and perspectives.
This approach mirrors the chaos of our contemporary lives, where we grapple with disjointed information and experiences, often leaving us feeling detached from both ourselves and others.
I meticulously manipulate finely ground glass using my signature sgraffito technique on flat glass sheets, fusing the powder into the glass in kilns. Layering and overlapping these elements, I merge the panels to convey narrative commentary. The composition of imagery and color within these panels is guided by intuition. The labor-intensive process of creating art helps me focus and experiment with depicting the poetry and magic of everyday life.
Working with glass allows me to portray color, fluidity, movement, sharpness, and precision. I embrace the transformative qualities of glass, using its transparency and reflective properties to enhance the visual impact. The kaleidoscope of hues and intricate designs symbolizes the diverse layers that make up a figure's personality, history, and cultural background. The interplay of light and shadow brings life to the glass panels, creating a sense of movement and dimensionality.

About the Artist

Director of the Washington Glass School since 2005, I specialize in teaching the sgraffito glassmaking technique. A recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholarship, I completed my work at the University of Sunderland and served as an artist-in-residence at the Institute for International Research in Glass. As an artist/educator, I've taught at prestigious institutions worldwide. Massachusetts’ Fuller Craft Museum mounted a solo show of my glass panels and sculpture in 2011, where they have my artwork in their permanent collection. My artwork is also in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tacoma (WA) Museum of Glass, Florida’s Imagine Museum, Fort Wayne, IN, Museum of Art, as well the artwork collection at the US Embassy in Bucharest. The DC Commission on the Arts &amp; Humanities awarded me the 31st Annual Mayor’s Arts Award for “Excellence in the Arts”. My professional practice involves presenting my artwork globally. Notably, I received an Award of Excellence at the 51st International Glass Invitational in Detroit and exhibited at the 2022 Venice Biennale's 'Glasstress' in Murano, Italy.

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Artist's Statement

Inspired by ways we transform ourselves, I work at creating creates glass pieces that have both visual and spatial depth. By layering and fusing sheets of glass with overlapping elements, I strive for an interactive commentary using simple forms with intricate glass powder drawings. These works are a continuation of my frit powder drawings that I have been working on for some time now. The layered compositions allow me to make unusual juxtapositions of imagery. My kilnformed work takes scenes and suspends them within layers of fused, formed and coldworked sheet glass. Using crushed glass powder to create drawings, I like to play on the elements of light, color and also sequence. The glass powder is sifted onto glass sheets, and by scraping and scratching the sifted black glass dust I craft my artwork. The glass panel is then fired in an electric kiln at temperatures up to 1500°F. This time-consuming process facilitates drawn-out contemplation of often overlooked imagery. I work hard to create some kind of meaning out of my artworks - dream-state surrealism using figures, text, and common objects, and hint at questions. The artworks suggest meanings but they encourage the viewers to draw their own conclusions. The work has an intrinsic meaning for me, but they remain open to multiple interpretations.

Featured Work

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Glass powder imagery creates this four (4) part work. At the core of my artwork is pure portraiture, but great focus on the disharmony of the self and perception. Pressures from society and the toll it takes on one’s emotional state are featured and the familiar is fractured and distorted by outside influence. I use the frit powder imagery as means of immersion into an emotional tenor. Recently, the world has changed so much that it has become a surreal experience. Feeling disconnected from all sense of “normal” creates a disconnect from one’s environment, as well as from our body and thoughts. We have come to feel that we are someplace else, in some other time, waiting for the moment when we are part of the world again.
My figurative artwork is an exploration of the human form through a fragmented and disjointed lens. By breaking down the body into abstract shapes and jarring angles, I aim to create a sense of unease and disorientation in the viewer. Through this approach, I seek to challenge the conventional notion of beauty and perfection that is often associated with figurative art. Instead, I embrace imperfection and the unconventional, allowing the fractured forms to reveal a deeper, more complex understanding of the human experience. I am drawn to this approach because it mirrors the fragmented nature of our contemporary lives, where we are bombarded with disjointed information and experiences that can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and each other. By reflecting this fragmentation in my art, I hope to encourage viewers to pause, reflect, and connect with their own sense of disorientation and complexity. Ultimately, my goal is to create art that is both visually striking and emotionally resonant, inviting viewers to engage with the tension between order and chaos, familiarity and unfamiliarity, and perfection and imperfection that is inherent in the human experience.
Commissioned artwork sculpture for new Arlington, VA residential/mixed use development. Framing the corner location of the new plaza at Fairfax Drive and North Quincy St. in Arlington, VA, the sculpture is made of almost 100 individual hand cast glass panels set into a bold geometric framework of acute angles that references the sculptural qualities of the new J-Sol building. The sculpture defines the location and creates a new sense of place with the layering of color, light and shadow. Merging architecture and design with their signature material, glass, the overall presentation of the sculpture is aimed to reflect our modern society and urban space.

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