Jeffrey Sarmiento - Catalog
Encyclopædia
Jeffrey R. Sarmiento
The Familiar and the Exotic: Glass, Identity, and Jeffrey Sarmiento
by Lena Vigna
I was there when glass first took hold of him—consumed him, is more how it seemed. Upon his first introduction to it, Jeffrey Sarmiento made a connection with glass—as material, as process, as history, as metaphor, as form, as an intellectual and artistic pursuit. He was/is relentless about technique and pushed himself to learn more, to make processes second nature. For those of us who wanted to spend time with him, we realized that glass was a mistress with which we could not always compete.
When I look now at what he has done with glass, I feel I can better understand how things developed. I remember with a smile all those times that my best friend, his then-girlfriend, and I would groan at the words, “I am going to stay at the studio.” At the time, I simultaneously felt that I understood why this had to be and that I did not, could not yet, grasp the situation fully. Years later I see that it is because this material—and all of those things that you could and could not do with glass, all of those things that it had been, could be, and never were—became the way in which Jeffrey Sarmiento defined his world.
A survey of the last ten years of his artistic production offers complex conceptual themes (sometimes interwoven): the use of glass as a metaphor for transparency and as a lens for viewing the world; an exploration of experiential knowledge (and ultimately, language) via the body; and an investigation of personal identity. Sittings (a 1998 collaboration with Maria Sparre-Petersen) offers a striking example (and entry point) for understanding how some of these ideas can be manifested within his work. Visible to the outside world, Sarmiento and Sparre-Petersen sit back-to-back and encased within cubes, a glass conduit offering shared breathing air. Intensely intimate, it is also intensely public—with respiration, a bodily gesture that many take for granted yet is needed for life, made tangible. This connection between the body and glass is paramount. In fact, I think it is the physical nature of working with glass—they way in which the body is always so intensely performative that contributes to its power for Sarmiento (a one-time gymnast, he has always been very aware of the body, its capabilities, its actions, and the space that it consumes). Even though the glass portion of this piece is relatively small, it is the connector that links bodies—it established the body-to-body connection.
International traveling and the subsequent learning of new languages encouraged an inquiry into the relationship between the body, materiality, and communication. Specifically, a trip to Denmark right after grad school had a profound impact on Sarmiento’s life and work. He states, “The language learning really stimulated new connections between text and forms, the body and speech…” Map/Tongue (2002), a series of enameled and cast glass tongues and a city map, suggests an understanding of the world via the tongue/body, as well as the mind. The map is not for actually orienting yourself within the city but for conceptually integrating into the culture of a foreign land. Land and body are joined as information from each entity is shared with the other. While the undersurface of each tongue is partially patterned with imagery from the map, an outline of the tongue is drawn over corresponding areas on the city plan—as if marking the map/land/space with the body and establishing a visceral connection. Ultimately with this work, Sarmiento gives form to the experiences he underwent, where the act of speaking—in this instance, the accumulation of another “tongue”—becomes a way of understanding the terrain.
Theoretically, Sarmiento has already begun to push these ideas even further—relating the learning of new languages not only to the body but also to personal identity. As the artist suggests, “Training myself to speak, read, and write Danish provided a critical entrance into the culture…from this experience, I realized that ethnic identity is not only complex but, in fact, constructed.” It is ethnic identity and personal heritage, specifically his own, that comes to the fore in his latest works.
Who we are and what we become is the product of our genetics, our environment, and our experiences and interactions—it is not driven solely by our own wishes and desires but rather caught up in them. Not until stepping away from his “American” upbringing, did Sarmiento really begin to address his heritage—comprised of Filipino transplants and their nurturing in a suburban Midwest community. It was the little things (“a slight accent or the smell of native cooking on my clothing”) that kept him at a distance, kept him from being, in his own words, “fully integrated,” and that has further contributed to his interest in exploring ethnic identity as a construct. His influences and impressions of what it means to be Filipino, Filipino American, an immigrant growing up in a country full of immigrants, traveling abroad and being exposed to new cultures, are conflated and translated into image-laden glass works. Feeling “other” while he was growing up, Sarmiento then went abroad and felt “truly foreign” for the first time. Not knowing how to speak the language, not knowing the area, having very little knowledge of Denmark before his arrival, he found his surroundings exotic. He, who had been the exotic before, was now the stranger in a strange land. And adjusting to this situation prompted moments of contemplation and an impetus to explore these collisions through his work: “The expression of my Filipino American heritage remains a constant, but I manipulate and remix this identity through new contexts…My attempts at assimilation force both a change in perspective as well as a reinforcement of held beliefs and values.”
In essence, sculptures such as Encyclopaedia and Encyclopaedia v. 1-8 (both 2007) are self-portraits, but rather than showing us what the artist may look like physically, they give us a glimpse of what he is like as metaphor and accumulation. Images from a multitude of sources—i.e. family photos, medical textbooks, corrections of Danish and German homework, glassblowing manuals, behavioral guides, twentieth-century ethnographic photography—trace the life-so-far of an individual. The richness of all of this information reminds us that personal identity is complex—something that goes well beyond (but does include) the tangible elements of a human being.
Even when Sarmiento uses a photograph of himself, he does not present it strictly as such. Triple Self Portraits (2007) are self-portraits but ones that are composed of conflated images—the artist, his father and his grandfather. Not only do they begin to address the physical form inheritance takes but they also allude to the idea that we are more than ourselves, that we are, genetically and psychologically, influenced by our family. They are portraits fractured and whole—obvious as representations of a man yet also hard to discern, “fuzzy” on the edges. They are visual imaginings of a psychological state—the reconciliation between whom and what came before and the notion of the individual.
In terms of career choices, Sarmiento did not follow his father’s path of becoming a doctor (despite gaining entrance to a pre-med program that he later left). However, he did seem to inherit an interest in exploring the body relative to the greater world. This attraction is manifested in the body as a communicative tool and as a site tied to larger issues of identity. Many of his most recent works could, themselves, be compared to a body—where images and patterns exist as if memories and ideas encased or “housed” within a physical form. They are the moments and connections of a person’s life made tangible and given visual form—they are bits of knowledge that are building up over time.
Sarmiento layers information in a way that suggests fragmented yet connected parts, ideas, and moments both significant and random. Significantly, he parallels physical properties of glass with his own examination of identity and states: “Glass acts as a lens that can focus, distort and transform ways of seeing.” Here glass metaphorically and actually provides the tension that he himself has felt as an other. The images encased within the glass are somewhat distorted by the glass itself and by his manipulations—treating sheets of glass as if pages in a book, emphasizing both the transparent nature of the glass (the ability to see one layer under or through another) and its cumulative effect. Sarmiento himself compares this work to a book in that he can print images on various pages that he can then “compose and arrange.” And, similar to a book, when one “reads” these works, they are presented with an accumulation of information—as if the images and patterns were words.
Sarmiento poses questions that have a tinge of the universal about them: Who am I? How am I affected by those around me? What is my role in the world? How do others understand who I am? His investigation of self is not definitive yet it does offer an illuminating picture of the complexity of identity. Despite being autobiographical, Sarmiento’s work resonates with anyone who has asked those same kinds of questions. And, his use of glass as an integral element is apropos as glass is seemingly a perfect medium for exploring concepts of perception—of “seeing” and understanding, of connecting mind and body. Harnessing physical properties of glass (which is used every day to correct problems with vision or to mediate visual experiences), Jeffrey Sarmiento turns his inward investigation outward—so that glass is not only the lens by which he sees the world, but also the lens through which the world sees him.
Cultural Crosscurrents
by Trinh H. Nguyen