Kris Pitzer
Kris Pitzer’s work examines humanity’s place in the natural world through the lens of anthropocentrism and the ecological cost of technological progress. Their practice confronts the contradictions of “advancement”—how innovation and convenience are often celebrated while the environmental damage they leave behind is ignored.
Working primarily with glass, steel, plastics, and found materials, Pitzer explores the tensions between permanence and disposability, reverence and neglect. The artist reflects on their own complicity in the systems they critique, grappling with the permanence of what they create and the ethical weight of producing in a world already oversaturated with things.
Ultimately, their art is not about solutions but about awareness. Each piece is an invitation to hold space for uncertainty, humility, and responsibility, while asking what it would mean to reimagine progress through a more ecological and interconnected lens.
Didactics
1. Lachrymatory for Eternal Reinvestment
Blown glass, turned mango wood, exploded unannealed glass segments, silicate rocks
15” x 6” x 8” | 2025
This vessel of contradictions meditates on grief, responsibility, and our fractured systems of material stewardship. At its core sit silicate rocks—geologic witnesses to our cycles of extraction and neglect. From the spigot, a drop of recycled glass forms, fragile and symbolic, recalling the lachrymatories once used to collect tears.
Glass, though infinitely recyclable in theory, is rarely treated as such. Instead, fractured infrastructure and inefficiency push us toward new extraction, masking waste as progress. Here, the tear is not just sorrow but an indictment of misplaced priorities—a call to reinvest not only our resources, but our care.
2. Anthology of the Anthropocene, Vol. 1: Pious Subterfuge
Welded steel, kiln-cast glass
7’ x 4’ x 2’
A monumental steel frame elevates something disturbingly ordinary: the crushed form of a plastic water bottle, immortalized in glass. Framed and encased, this disposable object appears sacred, a trick of perception that asks why permanence makes us value what we otherwise discard.
The work critiques our selective reverence and our failure to see waste as anything but invisible. By reframing trash as artifact, Pious Subterfuge forces confrontation: not to worship, but to recognize the quiet violence of consumption.
3. Anthology of the Anthropocene, Vol. 3: Ascension
Welded steel, plywood, Venetian plaster, repurposed plastic trash, blown glass, virgin HDPE plastic pellets
11’ x 6’ x 6’ | 2025
The final work in a trilogy, Ascension satirizes our worship of plastic and our surrender to convenience. A staircase rises through 45 cubic feet of collected refuse, leading to a shrine where pristine polyethylene pellets rest in a glass vessel—symbols of purity in a corrupted ritual.
The piece feels both ancient and futuristic, a ruin of tomorrow built from today’s waste. Suggesting reverence and pilgrimage, it questions whether our pursuit of “progress” is ascension or regression. What do we worship, and what do we leave behind?
4. Forthcoming: Rendezvous de la Mer
Mixed media installation
The second installment in Anthology of the Anthropocene, this suspended work is a plastic trash bag filled with recyclable glass and contaminated household waste, illuminated like a lamp. Retrieved as if from the sea, the dripping bag highlights the overlooked consequences of domestic disposal and the global reach of neglect.
By recontextualizing waste as artifact, Rendezvous de la Mer asks viewers to confront the ethics of consumption and the permanence of discarded matter.
