Bullseye Glass

The Bullseye Glass Company, founded by artists in the 1970s in Portland, Oregon, specializes in manufacturing glass for art and architecture. Bullseye is renowned for their exceptional craftsmanship, innovative techniques, and vast color palate. Dale Chihuly has hailed Bullseye as “the most sophisticated glass-coloring company in the world.” In-house artist projects, such as their collaborations with Jun Kaneko, have been important catalysts for factory innovations and technical advances. Kaneko’s projects with Bullseye have spawned improvements in a new, large-format sheet glass line and have initiated the production of enormous, non-lead, crystal-clear sheets of glass. 

Kaneko’s first exhibition at Bullseye, in 2001, featured four architectonic towers made from clear, primary-colored kiln formed sticks, a clear echo of his Parallel Sound installation from 1981. Six-and-a-half-foot slabs, also in primary colors, and a light tower were among the other works on display in Kaneko’s debut glass exhibition. A year later, his second Bullseye show reflected an increasing interest in the complexity of the glass medium and featured large, hanging panels composed of hundreds of stringers in a range of contrasting colors. Kaneko explained at the time that he was in the process of “developing a complex visual language within the simple placement of stringers on flat glass.”

His 2005 project with Bullseye produced pristine geometric forms in pastels and primary colors, as well as a 42-foot-long wall curled into the shape of a nautilus. Speaking about the more simplified geometry of these designs, Kaneko said, “I am becoming more elemental visually. To deduct complexity is difficult. To take something out, you have to know both sides of it.” 

However, despite a perceivable simplicity, the 2005 Bullseye Project posed unique challenges for the company, not least because of the scale of Kaneko’s designs. Many of the forty slabs weigh over 300 pounds, requiring hundreds of hours in the kiln and exceptional uniformity of heating, and required the fabrication team to handle over 180,000 separate pieces of sheet glass, each of which was cut, weighed, and cleaned by hand. The enormous wall, titled Mythology, required the Bullseye fabricators to treat and assemble approximately 60,000 threads of black and white glass. According to Bullseye, “the Kaneko project was the most time and labor intensive ever undertaken” at their factory. Yet, all the intensive labor dedicated to this project was well-worth the result. As the exhibition catalogue for this project notes, “What this mélange of minimalism and maximalism accomplishes is perhaps one of Kaneko’s most visceral and engrossing exhibitions in any medium.”