Literally Balling by Victor Solomon

Victor Solomon’s “Literally Balling” appropriates luxury material and antiquated processes to parallel a history of impractical grandeur. Literally Balling is the result of Solomon’s year-long apprenticeship under the last remaining stained-glass masters and hundreds of hours of fastidious, historically accurate craftsmanship.

From as early as 600 AD, it’s rare materials and exhaustive process have made stained glass a paramount symbol of wealth and power. Throughout the 12th century, stained glass windows adorning monolithic cathedrals flexed on behalf of a manors reign. The irony of the embellishment: removing the window’s intended function.

As basketball and its stars ascend to new cultural dominance, re-building the sport’s iconic symbol with the same painstaking medium both celebrates its evolution and satirizes the same ironic instinct to trade intention for opulence.

Literally Balling elegantly balances wit, irony and fastidious craftsmanship in exploration of a host of disparate narratives: the religious devotion to sport, the athlete as modern-day king of court, the proletarian drift of basketball from project pick-up games to newfound cultural heights, even a cautionary comment on the fragility of luxury.