Tuesday, September 19, 2017

The Venice Glass Week – Caterina Tognon – Jessica Loughlin – Afar Exhibition

Caterina Tognon Gallery
Afar - Jessica Loughlin
Caterina Tognon presents the first solo exhibition in Italy by the Australian artist Jessica Loughlin, entitled Afar on until January 6. Afar brings to Venice a body of works by the artist born out of her fascination with light and space experienced in the Australian landscape. By using glass in a Post-minimalistic way, Loughlin wants to convey a sense of both emptiness and abstraction, triggering a mental stillness in the viewer. Her subtle and quiet glass-works can be considered as abstract mindscapes, and express a beauty of emptiness lived in the reduced landscapes of the interior, where light and space are fused together.
The boundary between air, water, and ground blurred. Light became the landscape, and I looked down into the sky. It was as if I was suspended in space.”
Jessica Loughlin
Loughlin’s artworks are influenced by her experience of long travels in the desert areas of South Australia, where one of the largest salt lakes in the world resides, Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre. This lake rarely is fulfilled with water. Flying over it, different passages of shades become visible. These, starting from the salty white, tend to fuse with the bright-light azure of the sky, giving birth to huge views where the light turns into landscape and one becomes totally immersed both on a physical and emotional level. 

Caterina Tognon and Sandy Benjamin
The event was born from a collaboration between Caterina Tognon and Sandy Benjamin OAM, Melbourne, and it is part of the program of The Venice Glass Week.

Patricia and Barry Friedman

Landscapes of Light
‘My material is both glass and light, I use the glass to sculpt light and shadow.
Landscapes of light, a series of long and narrow wall pieces. They are bi-dimensional pictures that recall the ephemeral event of the water in the desert. Only thanks to a meticulous and slow gaze from the audience, all the changes of the colors can be catched. The title itself of this exhibition – Afarda lontano, tempts to highlight the importance of an extended observation. These are works that require a specific time to be admired and to induce the audience with a contemplative state, which is necessary in order to catch the transparencies, the light, and many undertones of the pieces.
David Landau and Howard Lockwood
Francoise Guichon and Jasper
Claudia Borella, Simone Vinall, David Gartelmann, Tom Moore and Rosie Hannam
Marie-Rose Kahane and Caterina Tognon
Caterina Tognon Gallery
Afar - Jessica Loughlin
“Loughlin has invented a unique technical process that both suggests and embodies the passage of water, flooding and leaving its imprint on the earth’s surface, evaporating, condensing again as cloud. She grinds solid glass into fine powder, which she moves across sheet glass with water, leaving imprints of the water’s movement across the surface. The water is left to evaporate, creating further watermarks in the glass. The glass is then fused in a kiln. This process is repeated to build up layers of these water imprints, residues and textures. The glass, like the desert, now holds the memory of water as it shape-shifts through phases of the hydrological cycle.”
Saskia Baudel
Australian author and biologist
Marco Arosio and Carla Cerutti
Art Liu
Gwenda Cermel and Alessandra Pianon
Afar - Jessica Loughlin
Receptor of Light|
The works, either wall-pieces or tri-dimensional sculptures are hand-made by the artist in her studio in Adelaide, with the use of flat kilns for the glass fusion.

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