Artist Profile: Carmen Menza

Blue in Green Dreams by Carmen Menza: About The Commissioned Art Work at Dallas Tower

Blue In Green Dreams is composed of over 1,500 iridescent stained-glass circles, hand-soldered into a unified atmospheric form. The work takes its title from the seminal 1959 jazz ballad by Miles Davis, a piece whose enduring emotional depth and tonal subtlety have long resonated with the artist. The artwork translates its expressive atmosphere into a visual and material language shaped by light, texture, and color. The resulting cloud-like formation appears to breathe, expanding and contracting, suggesting movement, duration, and the temporal nature of sound. 

The artist employs layering heavy solder onto each glass circle to create tactile surface variations and heightened material presence. This labor-intensive process emphasizes touch, weight, and physicality, grounding the ethereal visual effect in deliberate craftsmanship. Light interacts dynamically with the textured surfaces, activating shifting reflections. The work invites viewers into a contemplative space where visual perception and emotional memory intersect. The resulting cumulus form evokes the thought of dreams, hovering between presence and dissolution, where memory, sensation, and emotion blur and recombine. The work invites contemplation and reflection, offering a visual experience that unfolds slowly, much like a remembered melody or a dream that lingers just beyond clarity.

Iridescent glass, textured glass, copper tape, solder, acrylic hardware
10’h x 14’w x 1.75d
2026

Unfolding the Sky 1 & II by Carmen Menza: About The Commissioned Art Work at Dallas Tower

Unfolding the Sky I & II are two new light-based works that extend the artist’s long-standing investigation into perception, materiality, and the mutable nature of light. These works utilize interference patterns—produced through the interaction of layered materials, light, and viewing position—to create subtle yet continuous perceptual change. As viewers move, the works shift, unfold, and recombine, emphasizing perception as an active, embodied experience rather than a fixed visual event.

Building on earlier explorations of light as a sculptural and temporal medium, these pieces translate phenomena typically associated with physics and optics into experiential form. Interference becomes both a visual condition and a conceptual framework, revealing how small variations in angle, distance, and duration can radically alter what is seen. Color, pattern, and luminosity emerge and dissolve, suggesting a sky that is never stable but perpetually in flux and unfolding.

Unfolding the Sky I & II invite a contemplative and sustained attention. The works offer a field of possibility, where meaning is continuously renegotiated through movement, time, and presence.

Ribbed acrylic, cast acrylics, iridescent dichroic films
9’ 8”h x 5’w x 2”d each
2026

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