This year, the Kingston Powerhouse is 100 years old. Once the centre of a thriving industrial complex, it now functions as the home of the Canberra Glassworks. This exhibition curated by Magda Keaney is by six young and emerging glass artists. The concept of the exhibition is appropriately focused on history. It poses several questions concerning our perception of the past and the part played by objects and museum collections to evoke and give meaning to this past. In addressing this theme, artists also engaged politically with the question of obsolescence in a contemporary world not only of objects such as mobile phones but of fossil fuels once used in the Kingston Powerhouse.

Nick Adams and Georgina Cockshott look at modern objects that are very familiar – computer games and mobile phones that, because of the pace of technology, have now become obsolete. Lea Douglas has directly related her works to ruins, the props of archaeology, and Lucy Quinn has looked at the practice of collecting relics from the past as arranged in museums. Alex Valero has questioned the function of objects in a contemporary context and Ngaio Fitzgerald has created a video film of industrial architecture with an environmental sting in the tail.

Nick Adams is a Canberra artist who graduated from the Australian National University School of Art in 2013. Since then, he has worked at the Canberra Glassworks in the Emerging Artist Support Scheme. Adams has recreated the unique digital patterns of the characters and symbols of the iconic Pokemon game using the age-old technique of murrini glass-making. He remembers the original Pokemon game as part of his history and he has given this memory new life in a contemporary idiom that sees these memories encased as colourful graphic designs in glass.

Georgina Cockshott, who lives and works in Brisbane, has cast a series of mobile phones in pate de verre glass. For her, these objects are not only symbolic of how we live today but also what we discard in our consumer and technologically driven society. The works are a reminder of how far we have progressed technically as well as what is cast aside in one person's lifetime. The original mobile phone was never a very interesting design and reduced to a white moulded form it does not have great visual appeal. Perhaps if the concept had been pushed that bit further into suggesting the millions of phones discarded, it could have been a more multilayered work.

Lea Douglas is graduate-in-residence at the ANU School of Art Workshop. She has made a cast-glass series of grotesque-style sculptures out of stark, curved and twisted glass ribs. The artist does not say if her inspiration comes from the desolation of war zones but it is hard not to look at these dark evocative works without also thinking of the burnt out fuselages of planes and twisted girders of ruined buildings. Another work called A Poison Tree from 2014 shares this emotive sense of desolation being caused by the deliberate acts of man. In black glass with a leather-like texture, its roots glowing amber, the form of the tree trunk twists and almost seems to shriek out in its death throes.

Lucy Quinn, a Brisbane artist, is attracted by museums and their collections. Her piece Components, a collection of small glass objects that suggest bones, shards and other fragments, reproduces the archaeologist's hoard - oddments of the past that are reused to construct a historical narrative. This attractive collection of small glass objects is partnered with a work appropriately called Shiver, a large glass claw with black talons. It suggests perhaps a less benign aspect of collecting - the art of the taxidermist. Quinn's larger collection of glass objects - free form honeycomb pieces with a curved glass surface - are rich with colour and light. Perhaps they represent in their honeycomb structure, the architectural remains left behind by nature.

Alex Valero is an associate at the Jam Factory in Adelaide. His collection of objects is eclectic. There are an iridescent glazed bottle and a cup that could be from an archaeological dig. Instead they are labelled tongue in cheek as being from a contemporary collection of works belonging to the artist: Vessels from an Artist's Collection (Early Third Millennium). To this collection Valero has added some beautifully crafted flat geometric bottles of clear heavy faceted glass with necks of frosted glass. Although these objects resemble bottles they are not functional and perhaps if discovered in a future age are the kind of objects to perplex archaeologists. Valero questions the place of function in craft through making obviously non-functional objects – a question that in fact has a place in a philosophical history of craft aesthetics.

Ngaio Fitzgerald is a recently graduated Canberra artist. Her video Anthropocene is a journey around the staircase of an industrial building interior. The quiet eeriness of the mood created in the video is shattered by the sound of the glass being broken with its shards spilling like fragments of light down the stairs. Industrial glass for Fitzgerald is symbolic of how we see nature from inside a glass bubble refusing to acknowledge the environmental problems that confront us all. Fitzgerald notes that the energy released in the powerful act of shattering glass is a dramatic enactment of the tension she sees between man and nature.

New Glass 2015 is a thoughtful exhibition by young artists using glass not only to make objects but as medium of expression and engagement with the past and also with the future.