Vintage household appliances covered with hundreds of colorful pieces of broken tempered glass will be on view from July 3 through October 14 at the Museum of Fine Arts in the exhibition Domestic Reflections: Smashed Glass Assemblage by Mo Ringey.

There will be a reception with the artist on Tuesday, July 24, from 5 to 7 p.m., at the museum. The reception is free and open to the public. Ringey began working in glass about 12 years ago when her car window was smashed outside her Boston apartment, a fate common to many cars in her neighborhood. "Every morning I stepped over a fresh pile of someone else's window remnants, hardly giving it a thought," she explained. "Strangely, the fact that I was the victim this time made my own personal pile of glass look quite brilliant and hopeful." She saved the broken pieces and eventually made a vase. The project so inspired her that she went on to develop a technique for working with broken window shards. Included in the exhibition are a transformed wringer washing machine, two refrigerators, a toaster, a mailbox and other ordinary domestic objects that evoke memories from her childhood. Ringey, whose website name is "fridgequeen," describes these vintage objects as "bookmarks to a past place and time. I see the process of adding glass as 'psychic reupholstering' that turns a fridge into a jewelry box, a washing machine into a cooler, repurposing them into quixotic things." Ringey, a resident of Holyoke, Mass., received her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has also studied photography, graphic design, and watercolor. She has exhibited her work in more than 20 group and solo shows, including the Worcester Art Museum, the Northampton Center for the Arts, and the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts.