Few artists have redefined the dialogue between art, science, and history as profoundly as Josiah McElheny. Working with glass—a material both ancient and futuristic, fragile and enduring—McElheny explores how ideas are embedded in objects, how memory mutates through time, and how knowledge itself may be infinite, refracted, and unknowable.

His works shimmer with contradictions: they are both vessels and mirrors, archives and illusions. Each sculpture or installation becomes a meditation on how we understand history—if we can at all.

I don’t really believe in history. There’s no single story, only a constellation of them. You can only reassemble or add your own.

– McElheny once said.

This notion of history as a fluid network rather than a fixed narrative lies at the heart of his latest presentation at James Cohan Gallery, featuring pieces from two of his most ambitious projects: From the Library of… and Island Universe.

The Secret Fire: Learning the Language of Glass

McElheny’s fascination with glass began not in the studio but in the workshop. His artistic education took him to Europe, where he apprenticed in traditional glassmaking towns—places steeped in secrecy and skill, where knowledge passed from master to apprentice across centuries.

What began as a romantic pursuit of craftsmanship soon evolved into an inquiry into cultural transmission itself. In those factories, artisans created objects for aristocracy and modern designers alike, participating in fashion, architecture, and philosophy through material form. McElheny absorbed not only their techniques but their paradox: a system rooted in continuity that nonetheless shaped the aesthetics of modernity.

For him, glass is “both special and difficult”—a medium that can mimic any substance, yet resists full control. Its molten unpredictability, its shifting between liquid and solid, becomes an allegory for history itself: mutable, reflective, never complete.

Memory as Material: The White Sculptures and the Idea of Recollection

Much of McElheny’s work grows from imperfect memory. He is drawn to errors of recollection—misread images, distorted reproductions, and secondhand histories.

I often take something I see in a book or photograph and treat that misrepresentation as real.

– He explains.

This method of re-remembering animates his striking series of white works, in which he re-creates iconic mid-century modern furniture and design objects, stripping them of color and function. The result is seductive yet spectral—an exhibition that operates as both homage and critique.

These pieces function like “whitewashed” memories, acknowledging how the ideals of modernism—purity, progress, beauty—have faded yet continue to haunt contemporary aesthetics. In their blinding whiteness, McElheny’s objects become monuments to forgetting: erasures that illuminate what remains when cultural meaning has been polished away.

From the Library of…: Borges in Glass

In From the Library of Atmospheres II (2025), McElheny turns to Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 story “The Library of Babel”—a text that imagines the universe as an infinite library of hexagonal rooms, each containing every possible book. For Borges, infinity is both terrifying and divine; for McElheny, it becomes a sculptural problem.

The work resembles a framed image, but its surface opens into an illusionistic space—an architectural vista of mirrored glass hexagons, reflections multiplying into infinity. Within this recursive cosmos stand seven hand-blown glass vessels, rounded and luminous, each representing a container of knowledge. They suggest that understanding might not reside in language or text, but in atmosphere—in the invisible substance of thought itself.

Surmounted by prismatic devices reminiscent of barometers and gauges, these forms evoke scientific instruments reimagined as metaphysical tools. McElheny invites us to consider whether air, vapor, or light could hold stories—whether the world’s knowledge might be inhaled rather than read.

Maybe the mixtures of gases could be read, maybe there are novels to be experienced in the inhalation of an atmosphere.

– he muses.

Island Universe: Cosmology Meets Modern Design

In Island Universe, McElheny collaborated with cosmologist David Weinberg to build sculptural models of the Big Bang and the multiverse. The work’s inspiration came from the Lobmeyr chandeliers that adorn the Metropolitan Opera House in New York—mid-century icons that merge opulence with abstraction.

McElheny transformed these chandeliers into maps of creation itself. Each glass sphere or rod corresponds to measurable cosmic phenomena: clusters of galaxies, the passage of time, the flare of quasars. The installation’s luminous complexity enacts a philosophical inversion: where chandeliers once symbolized human grandeur, they now stand for our cosmic smallness.

Island Universe, now housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, expands McElheny’s preoccupation with multiplicity. Like Borges’s infinite library, his universes are plural, interconnected, and decentered—each one reflecting another in endless recursion.

Knowledge as Reflection, Reflection as Knowledge

McElheny’s glass libraries, atmospheric containers, and cosmic chandeliers all circle a single idea: that knowledge is never complete. Truth, like light, refracts through surfaces; meaning expands through reflection. His practice rejects the myth of originality—embracing instead transformation, reinterpretation, and dialogue across time.

This philosophy extends to his collaborations with filmmaker Jeff Preiss, including Portrait of a Library, a four-channel film installation that layers analog footage, VHS, and 16mm film into hypnotic visual palimpsests. Together, they create moving images that act like dreams of learning—memory flickering through technology.

Here, as in his glass works, McElheny celebrates imperfection: the overlaps, misreadings, and accidents that keep history alive.

The Infinite Mirror

Josiah McElheny’s art exists in the tension between clarity and opacity, precision and poetry. His mirrored vessels and radiant installations remind us that every object carries within it a fragment of thought, and that every act of looking is also an act of creation.

For McElheny, to make art is to participate in a continuum of reinterpretation—to accept that history is not a line but a labyrinth of reflections. His works do not tell stories so much as invite us to enter them, to see ourselves refracted in their infinite glass.

In the end, what McElheny offers is not certainty, but wonder: the shimmering realization that knowledge, like light, is most beautiful when scattered.