Nearly ten years since she began creating glass art, Anna Orlina puts forward her debut solo exhibition, a curious and luminous showcase of glass craftsmanship grounded by the artist’s personal experiences. In these new sculptures, Orlina contemplates the ways glass as a medium can articulate themes of lineage and selfhood, asking in the process: what gets passed down, what gets shaped from glass’s inheritances, and how do we forge a self out of these entanglements?
Family, faith, and femininity are Orlina’s great abiding subjects here. What is fashioned out of these thematic explorations is uniquely hers: playful and lucent by design, and revealing a contemplative core that draws on Anna’s experiences—as a young woman and daughter, as an inheritor of the Orlina glass legacy, among others—that have shaped her to be the person she is today.
Glass’s sensitivities—to light and shadow, as well as texture and movement—allow the medium to take on a range of interactive and optical depths while simultaneously communicating a certain severity in form. These affordances offer a tactile kind of play. Orlina likens the process of constructing her glass art, which includes the work of grinding, laminating and bonding glass pieces, using and reusing scraps to create something new, with the modular, hands-on spontaneity of assembling legos.
Across her first solo exhibition, we encounter an artist developing in real-time an approach to glass sculpture. There’s a real emergent, and lightly psychedelic, quality to these pieces. In their structure and scaffolding, these glass works reveal themselves over time, in different angles, as Orlina searches for forms and figures, often dwelling at midpoint between the figurative and the abstract, that can encompass the ambit of her artistic ambitions.
While the “reflections” of the exhibition’s title convey Orlina’s journey in reaching this pivotal point in her young artistic career, the word also alludes to the very material way glass can cast itself right back at us, transmitting our gaze back to ourselves. “I think the sculptures can become a kind of mirror—not necessarily because they tell the viewer my story,” Orlina says, “but because they give them an opportunity to think about their own.”
Text by Sean Carballo
