Anna Orlina mounts luminous glass work in debut solo exhibit

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Today, she is no longer a mere spectator. She has come into her own as a glass artist and proven herself to be an exceptional one, as she proudly put forward her debut solo exhibition called “Reflections of Being,” which took place at Galerie Stephanie, Shangri-La Plaza, in early October.

Orlina mounted her first solo exhibition after a decade of creating glass art, and it was a curious and luminous showcase of glass craftsmanship grounded by the artist’s personal experiences.

Inspired by family, faith, femininity, lineage and selfhood, the artist turned out luminous sculptures that explore the interplay of light, shadow, texture, and movement. They blended the figurative and abstract and reveal a contemplative core that draws on her experiences — as a young woman and a daughter, as an inheritor of the Orlina glass legacy — 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 for Orlina. The artist likens the process of constructing her glass art — which includes the work of cutting, grinding, polishing, laminating, and in upcycling scraps to create something new — with the modular, hands-on spontaneity of assembling Legos.

Through her exhibition, Orlina allowed her audience to see her developing in real-time approach to glass sculpture. There’s a real emergent, and lightly psychedelic, quality to her works of art. Given their structure and scaffolding, these glass works reveal themselves over time, in different angles, as Anna searches for forms and figures, often dwelling at midpoint between the figurative and the abstract, that can encompass the extent of her artistic ambitions.

The exhibit was called “Reflections of Being” not only because the word “reflections” conveyed Anna's journey in reaching this pivotal stage in her young artistic career. The word also alluded 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,” Anna said, “but because they give them an opportunity to think about their own.”

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