Originally from south central Kansas, Brent Sommerhauser’s work has been shown both nationally and internationally, most recently in Tilting the Basin: Contemporary Art of Nevada at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno (2017) and including the Windsor Biennial in Ontario, Canada (2004). His work is featured in the book, International Glass Art (2003) and in New Glass Review 26, the Corning Museum of Glass’ journal highlighting innovative works in glass.

Sommerhauser earned a Master of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University and Bachelor degrees (in both fine arts and psychology) from Emporia State University, Kansas. He has taught at the College for Creative Studies, Hastings College, the Kansas City Art Institute, Pilchuck Glass School, St. Mary’s College of California, and recently as an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is a member of the Telegraph artist collective originating in Detroit, Michigan in 2004, comprised of seven members with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. He actively pursues a range of adventures in addition to his art making and teaching career, such as working as a technical consultant on the island of Murano, and his current position as a props technician for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas.

There are thin, quiet places where invisible forces and visible material collide. The surface of an empty page approached by a pencil and a thought, or a little wind meeting the world; nudging, persuading, diverting.
I believe there is a potency there, at that barrier. Where, saddled with fuzzy lucidity, you might still lasso a daydream or tug at moments each afloat in their own way.

There and not there, everythings and nothings. Both, at once.

A “tangle of matter and ghost,” as Leonard Cohen mentioned a time or two.

In my work, I often use familiar and practical objects to merge two types of memory – the subtle mental process and that familiar record left upon physical material.

I consider this to be preserving a glimpse and as a prop to experience. In coercing material to bend to both memory and structure, the imagined is made tangible while romancing the real.