Matthew Bajor Unauthorized
Matthew Bajor is an artist and engineer who likes the complicated things in life
In 2017, Matthew Bajor became interested in pursing an art career after seeing large scale works by Buring Man sytle artists. After working on collaborative build projects, in 2019 he outfitted a metal shop in the first floor of his Wilson, WY cabin and began fabricating large art.
Bajor’s first art piece, Double Diamond, was granted in 2019 by Love Burn, a regional Burning Man event held in Miami, FL. Completed and exhibited in February 2020, its future tour was to be delayed 2 years due to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.
With the commercial festival scene on pause, Bajor began satisfying his curiosity around light and optics more , beginning to refit his Jackson Hole studio into a cold glassworking studio. His passion for glass was ignited, but with the reopening of the world post-pandemic, was left on the back burner.
He spent the next few years touring large flame effect setups while continuing to design and lead fabrication of his own large scale works.
A desire to be closer to family prompted a cross-country move to Boston, MA in 2022. Bajor found studio space at the Artisan’s Asylum. The constraints of a smaller workspace provided a catalyst to begin exploring a new medium, cold glass. A chance meeting with master glass artist Sidney Hutter lead to a mentorship and expedited understanding of glassworks.
Why build art at all?
As a moderately successful software engineer, working at a stable, profitable, and great company (Workday) Bajor was asked quite a bit why he was going to throw in the towel to build art in the woods.
Growing up in New England, he was exposed to a lot of “traditional” fine art in the museums around Boston, the architecture in NYC, and a lot of other cultural experiences. While the visits to nature such as the National Park system and camping trips had strong impacts on the artist. The representations he saw in museums never affected that much emotion or interest.
Bajor found most of the harder paths through this world and luckily got the opportunity to cross them off. He thinks if he been exposed to this type of large scale art, he may have been able to focus his energy on the more positive things in life. This leads to Winterworks’ current plan consisting of a set of goals working together to achieve a seemingly impossible task.
The end goal is to interrupt the steady stream of opioid addicts entering our society. Growing up in Southern New Hampshire in the 2000’s, Bajor is hard pressed to name a friend that was not impacted by the Opioid Epidemic. This seems silly to waste so much energy, love, and life to the folks profiting from pharmaceuticals. The approach he takes is multi-faceted in order to support forward motion at almost any funding level. This includes:
Building large scale art and involving the community.
Get these plans in front of high schoolers that have an existing vocational program. Provide assistance getting going by volunteering in the classroom, or potentially by inviting students to the shop. For Moonrock Mountain, the local First Robotics team was able to particpate and show their work in a way that was meaningful to everyone.
Assist in enabling these builds by combining patrons with the means to support our builds.
Enable the creation of new vocational programs in areas in need of distraction, either by interfacing with public schools or by creating radically inclusive Maker Spaces.