Exhibition Insight.. Gabriella Bisetto: First breath, last breath, everything in between
Gabriella Bisetto, The stars will always shine, 2024. Photographer: Michael Haines
Gabriella Bisetto: First breath, last breath, everything in between
Acclaimed artist and JamFactory Alumnus Gabriella Bisetto has led the glass program at the University of South Australia since 2002. Her major solo exhibtion is being shown at JamFactory in conjunction with Chihuly in the Botanic Garden.
Words: Stephen Atkinson, Program Director: Contemporary Art at the University of South Australia.
While silicon and plastic may have burrowed their way to the lead, it is glass that has defined us. Its gleam cloaks the steel frames of office buildings making them lanterns at night, and it channels daylight to domestic interiors, windows framing views like the pictures on our screens big and small. How we know the world has been shaped by glass: the lenses of microscopes and telescopes, test tubes, Petri dishes, cathode ray tubes, those lightbulb moments. Our metaphors of knowing and its limits are similarly vitreous, the transparency we demand, the glass ceilings, and the critical reflection we strive for, which no matter how scalpel sharp never quite manages to peel back the reflections that stare from bathroom and wardrobe mirrors, their cold, hard, horizontally flipped truths parried by poses and more flattering expressions. These vain attempts to momentarily align the image in the reflection with the one in our imagination suggest a line in alchemical thinking. In the mirror our flesh is turned to glass.
These uncanny tensions between flesh and glass, so materially at odds yet magically connected haunt first breath, last breath, everything inbetween, JamFactory’s exhibition of new work by Gabriella Bisetto. Bisetto, who heads the glass workshop in the School of Art at the University of South Australia, is an artist whose remarkable abilities and affinities with glass is second only to her fascination with the inner workings and wonders of the human body. If screens and mirrors turn flesh to glass, under Bisetto’s spell glass becomes flesh shifting beneath its skin, bulging, sagging, erupting, alive. This is part illusion of course. The majority of the works in the exhibition are physically static. Yet they refuse to stay still. They move with us, light rippling across their surfaces or reflecting it back. Constantly responding to their surroundings and to the other works in the gallery and inviting us to see ourselves reflected in them.
Like the titular work that casts its glow and its shadow over the rest, its words may be filled with neon but the glib summation of life they offer, equal parts memento mori and memento vivere, speaks of the air in our lungs. While glass’ malleability and impermeability is crucial to the work, it functions as pure apparatus here. Bisetto’s obsessions may have been propelled by her love of glass and its shape shifting ways, but as an artist she has never relied entirely on it. Elsewhere in the exhibition the glass blower’s practice is stripped back to pure exhalation. In The Stars will Always Shine a steel framed grid of cockatoo down alive with the memory of flight, flickers with the faintest movement of air like a post-apocalyptic barometer designed to detect traces of life, with us or without us.
The delicacy of those feathers may at first seem in complete contrast with the heavy mirrored puddles of Evaporates until it disappears, arrayed paradoxically like steppin stones on the gallery floor. Yet alongside the work’s title this solidity can also be read as a paean to the transience and preciousness of life. As with all the works in this exhibition, these are objects for deep contemplation, intended to enrich those parts of us that mirrors and glass cannot reach.
‘Gabriella Bisetto: First breath, last breath, everything in-between’ is showing in JamFactory Gallery One until 24 November 2024.