Dylan Martinez — Swedish Fish Water Bags For Sale

The Swedish Fish Water Bags take everything Martinez does with his water bag sculptures and add one more thing to disbelieve. A plastic bag, filled with water, tied at the top and completely convincing in glass. Then, inside it, Swedish Fish candy. The forms sit at the bottom the way loose candy would if you'd actually dropped a handful in — red, suspended, and completely still.

Each piece is hot-sculpted, sandblasted, and acid-etched by hand, the same process Martinez developed for his original H2O/SiO2 water bags, the series that first brought him international attention and a place in collections including the Imagine Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. That earlier body of work asked a single question: can glass convincingly pass for a water-filled plastic bag? Swedish Fish Water Bags adds a second layer. The bag alone is about illusion and material — the transparency, the trapped air, the slight give of a tied neck. The candy inside is about memory, the specific reddish translucency and soft-edged shape of something most people haven't thought about since childhood.

Getting both illusions to hold at once is more demanding than it looks. The candy has to read correctly through the "water," which itself has to read correctly as it would through real plastic, all while the piece is worked from solid, hot glass rather than assembled from separate elements. It is Martinez's most recent iteration of the water bag concept, presented as a numbered, ongoing series and shown in a dedicated viewing room at Square One Gallery, "Swedish Fish Water Bags — The Newest Iteration of the Water Bag Series."