Thomas Glassford | Magna Orchid

Thomas Glassford’s body of work spans an accumulation of everyday commodities and organic material, translated into mixed-media sculpture and constructions, found object assemblage, and painting. Throughout his career, he has immersed himself in a layered network of references that trace disparate fragments of history, contemporary culture, nature, and tradition. In the mid 2010s, Glassford began a series of mirrored wall reliefs depicting plants, flowers, animal stripes, cells, and light rays within a structured, woven framework. 

 

Like the bees, moths and other insects that pollinate the Cattleya variety of orchid represented in this work, the reflective contorted surface attracts the viewer’s residual energy while warping their likeness. Molded from mirrored acrylic, anodized aluminum, holographic paper and fluorescent pigment, Glassford has compared this series to the way a bowerbird collects shiny and brightly colored objects to decorate their nests to entice a mate. With its multilayered concave and convex surfaces that reflect the altered self and all else in one’s visual confluence, the artist considers themes of consumption, seduction and the proclivity to distort information.

 

Born in Laredo, Texas, Thomas Glassford earned his BFA at the University of Texas, Austin before moving to Mexico City in 1990. Glassford’s artwork is included in numerous public collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, Texas); Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX); and La Colección Jumex (Mexico City, DF) among others. He participated in the InSITE Biennial editions of 1997 and 2005 and in 2010 designed Xipe Totec, a permanent light installation at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University (UNAM). In 2022, he completed a mural and installation at the San Antonio Courthouse through the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture program.