Ghost Optics

Visitors to the Museum of American Glass will encounter a site-specific window intervention by guest artist and curator, Jocelyne Prince. Her work, Ghost Optics, addresses early methods of flat glass and bottle glass production. Of particular interest to the artist was the variety of Americana imagery found on the historic glass bottles in the collection. Wanting to source these images as directly as possible, Prince dug into the WheatonArts mold collection and honed in on one particular mold, a flask for spirits, which had an inset for interchangeable emblems. The imagery for these emblems was a mix of patriotic, historic, and commemorative motifs. This mold was part of an industrial technology known as the “American System.” Similar to industrial advances in other kinds of production, the glass industry capitalized on a bottle mold with interchangeable parts – in this case an assortment of emblem inserts meant that one mold could be used to make a multitude of different bottles.

Working with the Paul Wissmach Glass Company in West Virginia, Prince hot cast the various emblems and then fed them into the industrial glass roller. The emblems are stretched, crackled, and sometimes even fractured—their ghost-like watermark characteristic becomes visible at certain angles and invisible at other angles. This material process mirrors how we test our patriotism and democracy
. . . challenging its limits, and sometimes going beyond.