Artist Statement

The scenarios I create, and the settings in which they exist, are illustrations of the way my mind transcribes information, perception collaborating with experience.  I transform an illusive vision into a physical manifestation, and so the dream of a pillow becomes a place for my head to rest. The stories of my interior have been adapted to the exterior.  Growing and transforming, they lose any semblance of a recognizable beginning or ending, instead attempt to offer an infinite panorama.

I have been intent on creating nurseries for the imagination; exposed but protected environments that will catalyze and encourage a collaborative mind body experience. The work has the potential to become a cross section, a seam where information is exchanged for experience.  Here, imagination is solidified, dreams become truths, realities become dreams, and objects are key to the understanding of our foundations.

As I consider my own reasons to create: self definition, emotional nourishment, and communication, I recognize that objects have the ability to ground us, a physical shape to grasp while our minds are momentarily freed.  The narratives that I create already include the whispered words of my imagination and the culmination of my life’s experiences.  Daily, we encounter objects like this, mementos that are full of precious personal histories and it is our interaction with these objects that has the potential to enrich our own journey.  I am making my own worlds, having conversations in order to organize my feelings and understand my relationship to the past, present, and future. These stories are the histories of my heart and perhaps my most honest form of communication.  These containers act as pressure valves for the overflow of my mind, they carry the precious, the forgotten, and the unrealized, waiting with stillness the moment that curiosity and consideration activates them.

Artist Bio

Carmen Lozar was awarded a residency at the Corning Museum of Glass prior to attending graduate school at Alfred University where she received an MFA in 2003. Lozar has been a demonstrating artist for two Glass Art Society conferences, and was the keynote speaker and demonstrator for the International Flameworking Conference in Salem New Jersey in 2008. Recently, she was awarded “Rising Star of the 21st Century” from the Museum of American Glass. Lozar has taught twice at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and in 2013 she taught at Pilchuck Glass School. In 2013 she returned to the Corning Museum of Glass for a second residency. In the summer of 2014 Lozar looks forward to teaching at Pittsburgh Glass School, Appalachian Center for Crafts, The Chrysler Museum, and the Glass Furnace in Istanbul, Turkey.

Born in 1975, Lozar shows her work throughout the United States and is represented by Ken Saunders Gallery in Chicago. Carmen Lozar lives in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois where she maintains a studio and is a member of the art faculty in the Ames School of Art at Illinois Wesleyan University.