Jen Blazina, I Do Declare, 2025, Cast glass

Seeing Stella: An Installation by Jen Blazina
September 9 - October 17, 2026

Focusing intently on Stella Elkins Tyler’s decoration of her Newtown home and surrounding flora and fauna as inspiration for this site-specific exhibition, Philadelphia based sculptor and printmaker Jen Blazina creates an immersive tableau of sculptures, reliefs and 2D works reflective of Tyler’s interests in the natural environment.

While visiting the BCCC Newtown campus and Tyler Hall during preparations for her contribution to the 2024 group exhibition at HACG, Skull Sessions, Blazina’s imagination was sparked by seeing some of Stella Elkins Tyler’s personal artifacts on display. Blazina recognized a kinship in Tyler’s fascinating belongings with her own curiosity in uniquely designed, highly decorative historical objects that function in utilitarian daily life and rituals.

Clifford Eberly, Senior Manager of Galleries and Exhibitions at the Hicks Art Center Gallery, worked closely with the artist to select pieces for the exhibition. “Jen and I talked and texted for many months attempting to get inside Stella Tyler’s decorative consciousness for Indian Council Rock, her and George’s country manor estate. The French inspired architecture and gardens, the wallpaper in the music room, the opulence of the tapestries Stella made combined with the stories written and related to us all contributed to Jen’s creative process of realizing this installation. Jen’s sculptures, reliefs and patterns visually communicate how Stella took pleasure in nature and the arts to find mental peace and to ameliorate the effects of living through World War II”.

The glass and bronze sculptures Blazina created for the exhibition have been cast using the lost wax process. While the start to finished sculpture is time consuming, the results are mesmerizing. Plaster molds are naturally light grey when they dry. Rather than casting all elements of Stella’s pastoral surroundings of the estate; flowers, fans, tiles and birds, Blazina painted many a ghostly bright white. Four cast glass tennis balls shown with a white painted wooden racket on white astro turf memorialize the clay and tennis courts on the property now the site of a wedding venue. The whole installation achieves a unified spectral memorial, imagining Stella’s rarified lifestyle and signaling the passage of time.

Other key art concepts in Blazina’s total practice and on view here are functional vs. non-functional, formal vs. decorative, craft vs. fine art, and readymade vs. utilitarian. The artist is crossing philosophical borders while granting the viewer to access the temporal journey into Stella’s fantastic world. Through her installation, the artist invites us to question the purpose of our collected belongings and find the answers within our own minds. For instance, what is the function of a cast glass, perfume bottle “poof” in this exhibition? The glass poof clearly no longer functions as its soft, spraying original. However, as art it takes on new, cultural value as an object of potential collectible desirability; a symbol of this mutable, transformative process. Some viewers might remember using a poof to spray a beautiful scent on their skin. That memory now becomes a nostalgic transaction between artist, the sculpture and the viewer. While some may view conjuring nostalgia in art as a sentimental shortcut to comfort, Blazina digs deep, embracing it to signal personal and collective memories and at the same time celebrating both historic decorative design and critiquing consumer culture. Underneath it all the artist asks, “Can we find total happiness in the objects we make and collect”? In a note found in her exhibition catalogue to her mentor Boris Blai, Stella Tyler wrote: “To my Maestro and ‘Pupil’!! With all my thanks and deep appreciation for helping me to open the doors of Happiness.” While we may not always be joyful, for Tyler even as a talented pianist, she found her true happy place expanding her creative repertoire while courageously starting to make sculpture in her late 40’s.

Gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. and by appointment