Alan Binstock

Sculptor, Architect

By PGS Media

Alan Binstock states his career is balanced with a concurrent career as architect and master planner for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He has a continued exposure to near and deep space images as well as a bit of quantum physics which are all powerful influences in his work. Alan's work is often an expression of outer shape and inner structure, creating a dialogue with parallels in human life. His fascination with plate glass and shattered tempered glass is sparked by observations of apparent/gross forms and inner/subtle forms that are revealed by the telescope and microscope. Borrowing from his experience as an architect, Alan's work often uses glass and steel in a creative dialogue and makes an easeful connection with the building complex and agrarian context. As a lay person, Alan can both celebrate the frontiers of science and take poetic license with scientific theory in the creation of sculptural experience. 

Glass is shattered, broken, “cold fused” with resins, layered, sometimes chiseled, ground and polished like stone, creating opportunity to magnify and change inner forms. Its transparency allows a second reading beneath or beyond the surface, while the forms approach a simple, minimal grain of an ideal. Light is captured. Radiance becomes a part of Alan's palette, through a matrix of re-purposed tempered glass, resins and dyes, he engages the changing qualities of daylight to inform and enrich these sculptures.

Long-time influences include Newton and Einstein as well as the work of Isamu Noguchi, Martin Puryear, Andy Goldsworthy, and David Smith.

Alan's last show was at the American University Museum at the Katzen Center. Alan investigates forms that express the nature of the seeker's inner passage while capturing the wonder of the explorer's outward search to find meaning in the universe, overlaid with a fascination with process and materials.

To view Alan's work, go to his website. 

PHOTO: mygatewayarts.org