Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Neon, sculpture, glass, mixed media
Website: merylpataky.com
Meryl Pataky was born in 1983 in Palm Beach, Florida, and moved to San Francisco in 2002 to attend the Academy of Art University, where she fell in love with sculpture and received her BFA in the major. She has lived and worked in San Francisco ever since. She is represented by pt.2 Gallery in Oakland. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies program.
Beyond her studio practice, Pataky is the founder of She Bends, an organization dedicated to fostering diversity and sustainability in the field of neon art through curatorial projects and artist programs that promote historically underrepresented artists in neon — particularly women, trans, and non-binary artists — who work hands-on with the medium. She Bends has traveled to the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, the Midway Gallery in San Francisco, the Loveland Museum in Colorado, and other venues. She teaches neon bending in her San Francisco studio and has taught arts education in K-12 schools across San Francisco for over twelve years, currently as the middle school arts teacher at Synergy School. She has been a visiting artist at the California Academy of Sciences, YBCA, and the Exploratorium. Her work has been published in Crafts Magazine, Corning Institute’s New Glass Review, and Lust for Light, alongside artists including Ivan Navarro and Keith Sonnier.
Pataky’s practice centers on the relationship between her hands and material, organized around a meditation on the elements of the periodic table — from noble gases to metals and organics. Neon, her primary medium, is for her not a signage material but a sculptural one: a noble gas trapped within hand-bent glass, emitting light from within. She combines neon with silver, copper, steel, handmade paper, and organic materials to create multi-material works that trace their subjects from the origins of the elements in the cosmos to their applications in culture and myth. Her recent series of borosilicate glass candelabra sculptures — forms that house both burning candles and glowing gas — explore the ephemeral and the persistent as dual registers of energy and time. A sustained concern with climate crisis, motherhood, and the slow labor of making drives her most recent work, which draws on Louise Bourgeois’s maternal metaphors and the structural resilience of nacre (mother of pearl).
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