Open Thresholds, a Malina Cipleu Solo Exhibit (Artist Talk)

Malina Cipleu is talking about her work at Ghost Pepper Gallery on Saturday, August 15, at 2 PM. It's an artist talk centered on Open Thresholds, the first solo show the gallery has given her. Cipleu is a visual artist who works primarily in kiln-formed glass, and the talk is a chance to hear her talk through the collection while it's still on the walls.

Her process is a slow one. She layers powders and builds modular compositions, firing the material at alternating lower and higher temperatures to get granular textures and soft, diffused color transitions. The pieces shift with light and position, so they invite a slower kind of looking—the kind of work that changes as you move around it.

Rather than depicting nature directly, Cipleu draws from the rhythms and patterns she sees across natural systems: growth, adaptation, accumulation, erosion and exchange. She treats nature as a form of intelligence, and the resulting series functions as a meditation on transformation, presence and continuity, giving shape through light, form and color to the unseen rhythms and quiet connections that flow through the natural world and human experience.

If you can't make the talk, the exhibition itself runs from July 28 through September 19, so you've got plenty of time to see the work on your own. The artist talk is on Saturday, August 15, at 2 PM at Ghost Pepper Gallery in Austin, and it's free to attend.