(torch hissing) - I am originally from Cleveland.

(torch hissing) I went to college out in Boston.

I went to MIT.

This is the hose that you'll see on most glass blowers.

I got my engineering degree with kind of a focus in art and design.

These stop your eyeballs from getting sunburned.

- I remember these.

(Rosie laughing) (plastic rustling) - I gotta find where my glass stash is.

After I graduated from college in 2021, (glass scraping) (tool clinking) (glass clicking) I felt very, I guess, disconnected from a lot of what I loved about engineering, which was hands-on things, getting to actually make stuff.

(upbeat rhythmic music) I make neon.

(upbeat rhythmic music continues) The name of my artistic practice is Neon Signs from the Universe.

(upbeat rhythmic music continues) That actually came from the fact that when I was thinking about sorta these classes that I was maybe gonna take after college, that I had two people in the same day tell me that they'd always wanted to learn how to do neon.

So it was my little sign from the universe.

(laughing) I make both traditional commissions you'd think, so like open signs for people, brand signs for people.

And then I have more of the studio side.

I often make these sort of smaller lamp type figures.

Basically a lotta the goal of my practice is trying to bring neon into people's homes in a way that doesn't feel like a beer sign or doesn't feel confrontational maybe or like it's taking up the whole space.

So focusing on how I could make maybe smaller or sculptural things that feel like they blend in to peoples' space but still bring literal light to other peoples' lives.

(upbeat rhythmic music continues) (glass clicking) (no audio) (bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) We're in the Milwaukee Makerspace.

It's a like coop nonprofit in St.

Francis and in Bay View.

It's got everything from neon, to casting, woodworking, metalworking, and it's 100% volunteer-based.

So when you start, you're bending flat to a pattern.

You draw out everything you're gonna do.

You lay it on the table.

You make sure that each one of the lines is exactly the glass width apart from each other.

(flame hissing) I think I started in earnest probably in 2023 after I had been practicing for a few years and kinda getting back up to speed with things.

(flame hissing) I think my artistic practice continues to be driven by trying to push the things that I was initially taught in neon.

(flame hissing) It's an exercise in controlled rule-breaking for me as a very structured person.

(flame hissing) I'm also driven by trying to find kinda the boundaries of how many little bends I can tuck into an area, how I can push the sort of often 2D work into three dimensions.

(flame hissing) It says PBS.

- Yes.

(Rosie laughing) - I never get bored with neon.

It always has something for me at the end of the day.

(light music) The show I've got at River Press is called "Still Life."

It's a collection of these figures that I've been working on in my sort of studio side of the practice for a long time now.

So the concept of it is like of a high-rise building, and you're viewing into each one of these apartments, capturing with these neon figures the daily gestures of life.

(light music continues) Laying in bed with your partner, cooking an egg, sitting on the couch watching TV, basically the daily activities of life, but translated into light and color.

I find it fun to look at something that is missing what we would normally see as conveying emotion and like a human body, but is conveying it just through line work and color.

I think, one of the things that I really wanted to highlight in the show as well is that all of these people are together, but they're also divided, right?

They're living in their own apartments.

They're living their lives.

They're isolated.

But when you step back in the larger picture, they're all living in the same place with each other.

They're in community with each other, but they're experiencing despair, joy, or these things, and part of the goal of this as well is to have that feeling of whatever you're feeling, whatever you're doing, even if you feel like you're isolated, you're living it in community, you're living it as part of this larger thing.

It brings me comfort and I hope it'll bring other people as well.

(light music continues) (light music fades out) (bright music) - Thanks for watching "The Arts Page."

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