Jenn Shifflet: Shimmer

September 7–October 25, 2018

For the first time, Jenn Shifflet’s new work in glass will be shown alongside her paintings, for which she has been known for more than 20 years.  Shifflet sees the two mediums as having a conversation, both sharing themes of color, light, time, life’s beauty and impermanence.

Since her residency at Bullseye Glass in 2015, Shifflet has translated her distinctive visual language of light, transparency and atmosphere into a completely new medium—kiln-formed glass. Her wall-mounted glass panels have the feel of Rothko-like color fields, bejeweled with countless handmade glass beads evocative of droplets of water, or glimmers of light. In these featured glass works as well as in her latest oil paintings, Shifflet transports the viewer to ethereal realms. Composed of concentric circles in multiple, sometimes rainbow colors, her new paintings are focal points for contemplation. Shifflet calls these studies of “…halation…the blurring of light and color surrounding a bright area, like a halo or aura. “ Viewing these paintings is like glimpsing a rainbow of light around the moon, a fleeting, beautiful phenomenon that holds one captive in wonderment.

-Virginia Tominia, Curator

About the Artist:

Jenn Shifflet (b. 1972) received her BA from Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA in 1995 and her MFA from John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA in 2004. She was awarded an affiliate residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2004 to 2007. In 2016 she was awarded a full scholarship by the Corning Museum of Glass, and in 2013 was the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Grant Award. Her work has been exhibited nationally since 1988, including at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Rotunda Gallery, Corcoran Gallery and National Cathedral in Washington, DC; Maryland College of Art and Design, Silver Spring, MD; University of California at Santa Cruz; di Rosa, Napa; Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek; Kala Institute, Berkeley; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Worth Ryder Gallery, UC Berkeley and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD.  This is Shifflet’s fourth solo exhibition at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary.