Jay Musler's work speaks about his relationship to nature, society, and especially the city. At the time that he turned to making art as a full-time career, he was experiencing the violence, crime, decadence, social deviance, and alienation which are rampant in our cities. Musler says that at the time "my creativity was being called upon to mentally process my engrossing surroundings. At this point, I had to commit to my own work so that I could fully participate. I could no longer watch".

Musler was born in 1949 in Sacramento, California, and attended California College of Arts and Crafts from 1968-71. Thereafter, he worked as a glassblower for Maslach Art Glass, doing somewhat production work. It was in 1981, after nine years of glassblowing experience, that he turned to making art as a way to mentally process his surroundings.

In an effort to connect visual terms and mental meanings, Musler has established a verbal vocabulary which reflects his perception of his world and his reality. Words like purification, atonement, outside world, art and laughter, light and freedom, confusion, emotional exhaustion, mental torment, voyeurism, color theory, human behavior, awake, asleep, search for pleasure, tragedy, victim, and counter-culture give voice to the ideas which are expressed in his pieces. Musler is compulsive about his method of reflecting thoughts and strives to encounter art as opposed to looking at its surfaces.

He is also compulsive about technique. In fact, he has been called a matchstick hobbyist. The aptness of this phrase is obvious when looking at a piece like "Cool, Cool, Deep Blue," where thin, rectangular pieces of plate glass are assembled with glue, sandblasted, and painted. Small lampworked pods or chrysalis forms are suspended from the cage. Most of Musler's pieces are made with a combination of techniques chosen to get the required effect. They always incorporate glass which has been sandblasted and painted, but the glass is not exclusively flameworked.

Musler states, "with all of this, I try to bridge what seems hopeless, by the experience of losing one's innocence, a mental landscape is created that differs from the physical landscape. My relationship to society and nature on a physical plane, is transferred to the vertical and horizontal of my mind. Through this process I work. Here are the bridges I construct at various levels, on several paths, to cross the many parallel meanings of life".

Musler has been represented by the following galleries: William Traver, Heller, Dorothy Weiss, Maureen Littleton, and many more. He has been collected by The Corning Museum of Glass, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hokkaide Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, Wheaton American Glass Museum, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Works