3 Questions For … Jill Reynolds

At the Pittsburgh Glass Center studio, Dan Spitzer and Jill Reynolds are making the individual lighting pieces for their PIttsburgh commission.

GLASS: What are you working on?
Jill Reynolds: The project I’m working on this fall is a permanent installation for the lobby of a skyscraper in downtown Pittsburgh, for the Sculpting Light on Stanwix competition that was organized by Pittsburgh Glass Center. This is the first truly collaborative project I’ve done with my husband, Dan Spitzer, glassblower extraordinaire. Called Rivers of Glass: Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, it will portray the three rivers that define the city of Pittsburgh. The shape of the rivers will be made up of around 1320 pieces of blown glass in various shades of blue, the forms based on high-speed photographs of water droplets, suspended at various heights from the ceiling on 374 thin cables. When viewed from the plaza in front of the building the full 160 foot length reveals a four-foot thick undulating wave form based on the 3D sound pattern generated by the musical composition “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, a Pittsburgh native. The piece will be finished and installed by the end of 2009.

The installation of Rivers of Glass: Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, by Jill Reynolds and Dan Spitzer, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2009.

GLASS: What have you seen recently that inspired you?
Jill Reynolds: One masterpiece that I keep returning to is The Panorama of the City of New York, the world’s largest scale model, originally fabricated for the 1963 World’s Fair. It’s on permanent display at the Queens Museum of Art at the old fair site in Flushing Meadows and shows every building in all five boroughs. What I find endlessly fascinating is the integration of its formal qualities: huge scale, color palette, construction details; with its content: all the information already inherent in any map but here pushed to an extreme because of its immense size. Add to that my personal history with locations on the map, the “city at night” light show, and the miniature plane taking off from LaGuardia, and it’s hard to beat.

A computer rendering of how the finished installation will appear. computer model: bo gehring

GLASS: Do you have any exhibitions coming up that you can talk about?
Jill Reynolds: For the spring semester of 2010 I’ll be a visiting artist at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, where I’ll be teaching a class on combining images and metaphors of art and science, and making related work for a solo exhibition in the Middlebury Gallery of Contemporary Art. Some of the ideas I’ll be working with are mapping complex systems, micro/macro structures, gnomic poetry, and neuro-geography.