25 Year Retrospective Exhibition

“BANJO”

November 16, 2024

627 E Main St,
Grass Valley, CA 95945

Pop-up Exhibit of Mind-blowing Glass by Banjo

An exclusive two-night pop up show of the psychedelic glass artist Banjo’s colorful glassware, crafted for connoisseurs, opens at The Chambers Project gallery next weekend.

The Chambers Project’s doors open to a VIP preview for collectors on Friday 15th November.
This is a rare opportunity to collect America’s leading pop-surreal glass artist’s new creations. Banjo’s glass is on a shimmering and refractive boundary between fine art and pop-culture, mixing imagery from films and icons of modern culture with the delicate and highly evolved craftsmanship of borosilicate glass. He is a master of technique, an innovator of color, and has a sharp eye for an appealing subject, equally willing to adapt the spirit of the sacred statuary of Hindu gods, the iconic imagery of nostalgic Americana, and the evolved pipes of cannabis paraphernalia into new and extravagantly rich sculptures of dancing color, and smooth layers of three-dimensional delicacy.

The show is partly a retrospective of treasured and important works from the past twenty-five years of Banjo’s career, but also includes a group of new collaborative sculptures created specifically for this exhibition. Because his work is in constant and immediate demand from enthusiastic collectors, Banjo seldom has enough inventory at one time for a public showing. This will be the first large collection of new works all in one place since his debut show at the Gregorio Escalante gallery in 2016.

At 4pm on Saturday 16th the gallery opens to the public for a single evening celebrating the light of Banjo’s visionary four-dimensional glass sculptures. The artist will present a slide show to begin the evening, then DJ Qbert will open up the music, with the exterior of the building lit up in beautiful projected imagery, created from Banjo’s glass by collaborative master light artist Johnathan Singer.

Banjo’s unique art has its source in two contradictory birthplaces. Early on, he was interested in making functional glassware for cannabis-smokers, finding a liminal but lucrative outlaw market for sophisticated pipes that emerged as an integral part of the high-priced end of cannabis culture, first selling his work in the traveling marketplace that followed the Grateful Dead as their cavalcade toured the United States, then later, as his techniques and mastery became increasingly sophisticated, to private collectors who appreciated his work for its aesthetic virtues as much as its practical use. Banjo said, “I was completely immersed in psychedelic culture at the very beginning when I first came into glass. When I was in my early twenties during the ‘90s I dropped out of art school and went traveling around deep in the woods to these hippy events…”

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When his first child was born, Banjo saw the need for stability. His work evolved into beautiful hybridity in Oregon, where cannabis paraphernalia met fine art. There, he learned about the soft glass work championed by Dale Chihuly, who liberated the craft from the tightly controlled and ancient cliques of Murano artisanship and began the American renaissance that lifted glassworks from their confinement in curio cabinets to the status of highly evolved sculptural masterpieces celebrated in museums and galleries around the world. For his part, Banjo incorporated clever techniques of color into the silicon ‘hard glass’ that originated among 19th century laboratory equipment manufacturers, and became a leader of fine artists working with this more durable material. It is an exciting new area of 21st century art. Curator Brian Chambers commented, “Watching the glass world expanding during the last fifteen years has been very exciting and entertaining to witness. I’m honored to be a part of it merging further into the fine art landscape. The attention to detail and cutting-edge craftsmanship is undeniable, and seeing twenty-five years of Banjo’s work under one roof is going to be mind-blowing for everyone who understands this ever-evolving medium.”

Banjo works hard glass into layered and beautiful spectacles and says his psychedelic visions inspired his early approach to the art form. He explained, “Early on when I was learning these things I couldn’t really tell the difference between the hypnogogic effects of the color-play behind my eye-lids and the actual glass, because the visions started mimicking and being informed by the glass patterns I was learning. It was all so much to take in at first – You’re manipulating the color sticks and the glass in different ways, and there’s also this alchemy element because you’re vaporizing gold and silver and a number of other rare metals in different amounts onto and into the glass, which causes it to either refract or reflect the different wavelengths and colors. I can remember from the start the way that the psychedelic experience and the actual physical experience of dragging glass rods around and making colored patterns were linked, each one fed the other. I found when I would come home to sleep after working, and would be in those in-between dream states, I couldn’t tell the difference if my visions were hallucinations or possible glass experiments… this was quite a period of open-ended exploration.”

His Isis is a superb example of the hybrid space occupied by these extraordinary sculptures. The lilac and black goddess has a spectacular rainbow aura of colorful flames radiating around her as she sits in meditative pose on a platform of bio-mechanical structures. She is far removed from the conventions of hippy tributes to Hindu faith, and better placed in futurist visions of science fiction. He said, “My current body of work for the past ten years has been meditating goddess figures, and they have a biomechanical aspect, because I was a big H.R. Giger fan. He was the first big influence on my glass work, then Alex Grey and psychedelic world traditions folded in later. My Mom was a collector of art from all over the world, so I grew up with a lot of influence from Hinduism and Buddhism, and Middle Eastern traditions. Combine that with psychedelia and H.R. Giger’s Alien.”

Brian Chambers first met Banjo at his breakthrough show at Gregorio Escalante Gallery in LA in 2016, when Escalante, the genius curator who co-founded Juxtapoz magazine (with Robert Williams) and also founded Copro Gallery, insisted Chambers come to the opening of the exhibit. Escalante died in 2017, passing the baton of championing new art that challenges convention to Chambers. Today, The Chambers Project is at the glowing center of the vibrant psychedelic art movement, and has an international reputation for introducing the very best of innovative artists to the narrative of contemporary art, and exhibiting the finest of historic paintings, drawings and sculptures.

Chambers said, “My taste in art has always been rooted in the counterculture. Banjo’s story obviously began in the underworld as well. I’ve always naturally gravitated towards the mavericks and pioneers in the field of creativity and Banjo has been at the inventive pinnacle of the glass world for a very long time.”