"Thence," by Rob Wynne
Locks Gallery
600 S Washington Square
Philadelphia
Showing June 3 - July 11, 2025
Seen June 17
“Thence” means “from a place or source previously mentioned.”
It’s not a frequently used word; it’s the exhibit title for artist Rob Wynne’s latest show of linguistic sculptures at Locks Gallery.
Wynne is known for writing words and drawing shapes using melted glass. His discovery of medium, he said, was an accident: In an interview archived by Locks, Wynn recalls once “holding a laden molten glass when it slipped out of my hands and spilled onto the floor, making a huge splat, which was absolutely spectacular.
“At that moment I thought it was a kind of cosmic explosion and that it would be so interesting to fix it permanently, silver it and see it really glimmer. That led me to realize that I could control it somewhat more than just letting it fall out of a ladle and I could start making actual letters.”
With whimsical spontaneity, Wynne hardens ethereal phrases like “In the Air,” “Reflection,” and “Moonbeam” into shaky, glass bubble letters. A light-hearted spirit to the celestial signage brings the artwork down the earth.
Glass could be used to underscore the ways in which words can be sharp, cutting, hateful. But Wynne leans into the material's pliability and reflective power to emphasize the loose beauty of language; words, like art, are nearly always open for interpretation.
Wynne’s texts are less compelling than his abstract forms. If anything, it seems like the scripted stuff mainly serves to prime us to see punctuation in the artist’s other pieces.
In particular, “Waterfall” and “Quiet Wave” stand out as gushing collisions of sequinned material designed to catch our eye. The fluid dribbles of liquified and later frozen glass look like splashes of water; sperm; tadpoles; tears; commas; periods; apostrophes. The enduring gemmy glamor of these designs is tamed by the fragility of its brittle glass reality.
These markings make sense of Wynne’s work as something to be felt, not merely spoken into existence. Words are, after all, capsules of personality and flair as much as function. Punctuation is what reminds us to take pause and pay attention to the true nature of things, to balance what is said with how it’s presented.
“Thence" asserts that communication, like molten glass, is a reaction. All words, feelings, material resources come from something before them — but that doesn't mean they can't be reshaped into something new.
