Jen Blazina - Recollection

Opening September 7, 2007
First Friday Opening October 5th, 5 - 8 PM,
Exhibition continues through October 27, 2007

Projects Gallery announces “Recollection”, a mixed media installation experience by Philadelphia-based artist Jen Blazina. In her debut with Projects Gallery, Blazina’s installation makes use of the gallery’s unique subterranean space. Featuring glass and resin objects and incorporated vintage images, “Recollection” crafts a moving experience that investigates issues of memory and the communal personal past.


Jen Blazina, Recollection, installation view, cast crystal and found image

While on a glass fellowship at the Creative Glass Center of America, the artist was inspired by its one-room schoolhouse. Using steel and cast glass, Blazina fabricated replicas of the antique desks with old class photographs as the desktops. Internal lighting projects these images as an ethereal presence in the nostalgic environment. The artist’s work evokes concepts of the collective unconscious, manifested in the period photographs silk-screened onto frosted glass. The dreamlike quality of the prints calls to mind the distance between past and present and the uncertain nature of memory itself. The universality of the schooling experience, juxtaposed with the historic nature of the objects and images, allows us to imprint our own recollections and memories into this installation. There are elements of nostalgic yearning, but the experience also allows the viewer to become a voyeur into an era and place that the passage of time has softened.


Jen Blazina, Recollection, installation view, cast crystal and found image

Jen Blazina received her M.F.A. in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art, her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, as well as her B.F.A., cum laude, from the State University of New York at Purchase College. She is a currently a professor of fine arts at Drexel University and has recently been awarded a residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. The artist has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums around the world, including the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. Her work has been collected by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Cranbrook Museum of Art, The American Museum of Glass Art, Kala Art Instutute, Toledo Museum of Art and others and in various private collections.

“Recollection” opens Friday September 7th, with a First Friday reception October 5th, from 5-8 p.m. The exhibition continues through October 27th. Projects Gallery is located at 629 N. 2nd Street in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday noon to 5 p.m., and Friday and Saturday noon to 7 p.m. A preview of this artist’s works may be viewed on the gallery’s website at www.projectsgallery.com. For more information, please contact Projects Gallery at 267-303-9652 or info@projectsgallery.com.