RACINE, WI.- The Racine Art Museum commissioned internationally recognized glass artist Matt Eskuche to create a new exhibition for its Windows on Fifth Gallery. Open August 6, 2010 through July 24, 2011, Matt Eskuche: Agristocracy uses the colour, line, form, and shear abundance of food and beverage packaging as the catalyst to create high end design within the space of RAM's windows. In recent years, Eskuche has carefully recreated the trash in his installations using a variety of media, but has primarily relied on Italian glass working traditions in order to produce a startlingly realistic body of work.

Impressed by the global impact of consumerism on economies, environments, and land and humanitarian rights, Eskuche has used flameworked glass, paper, cardboard and other materials to create soda bottles, fast food packaging, and other items commonly seen as nothing more than "trash." For his Windows at RAM installation, Eskuche has expanded the scale and scope of his work-not only assembling the most grandiose tableaux of his trash glass yet, he is also exaggerating details of individual objects and turning them into large-scale compositions of paint, plastic, and light. With this new element of his work, Eskuche challenges how we understand the role of "consumer waste" in our lives-finding beauty in unexpected places and encouraging us to consider the complex web that links preciousness, luxury, consumption, politics, and the environment.

Matt Eskuche will return to the museum in March 2011 to modify the exhibition and create a fresh new experience.

Together, the two campuses of the Racine Art Museum, RAM in downtown Racine at 441 Main Street and the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts at 2519 Northwestern Avenue, seek to elevate the stature of contemporary crafts to that of fine art by exhibiting significant works in craft media with painting, sculpture and photography, while providing outstanding educational art programming.