Brynn Hurlstone: Within/Without
May 22nd – July 12th, 2024Opening Reception, May 22 from 6-8 PM.
Glass has the power to elicit tension, give substance to invisibility, and call for care. Utilizing these material truths in poetic interplay with steel, water, and personal disclosures gathered from across the country, Within/Without asks the viewer to engage with the precarious. Kinetic glass vessels filled with the stories of individuals who have experienced domestic abuse cover the walls of the installation, seeming to vibrate with the contained potential of their message. When chosen by visitors and placed upon nearby steel pressure plates that tilt in response to gesture and presence, the glass objects spill swirling water and text onto their shifting canvas, creating compositions laden with transformation and connection. These steel process drawings, collected throughout the exhibition and added to the walls of the gallery, join the glass vessels to create an immersive environment. One that celebrates vulnerability, and rewards slowness, effort, and the generosity of releasing truth.
Alongside Within/Without, artist Brynn Hurlstone will host the panel discussion Are You Sure You Want to Do That? Art Making and the Dreaded T-Word, a conversation with artists who utilize personal trauma as a departure point for their creative practice. Join us as the artists and audience engage openly with the triumphs, rewards, sacrifices, strategies, and reactions that result from this vulnerable and often stigmatized form of making.
About the Artist-
Brynn Hurlstone is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and fabricator who creates immersive, sensorial objects and environments that invite engagement. She considers trauma and its relationship to precarity, unspeakability, isolation, connection, and release by allowing material reactivity and subjective experience to speak reciprocally through her work. Hurlstone is the owner of Second Generation Glassworks, the co-founder of the Glass Impact nonprofit coalition, and the former Director of Operations of Public Glass in San Francisco. She received a BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2008 and an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture in 2023, where she remains as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. Her recent exhibitions include 5into1 at Moore College of Art and Design, the Workhouse Glass National at Workhouse Arts, Art of the State 2023 at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, and Through a Glass Darkly at Delaware Contemporary Museum, the recent national exhibition which was hailed as the “new guard of glassmakers” in the Spring 2023 issue of Glass Magazine.
