Melissa Dorn

Melissa Dorn

Fem-utility Closet
October 6- 27, 2024

Fem-utility Closet offers you the time and space to fully feel, engage, and contemplate the world you’ve entered, potentially evoking a sense of wonder and delight. As you get closer to the objects and materials, you may begin to think about the everydayness of what is around you and the labor, most often unseen, that goes into our everyday existence. Melissa Dorn is particularly interested in how mops, feminism,
craft, and labor intertwine. Her obsession with industrial mops spurred a love of repeating textures, lines, and historically gendered craft processes. She started with the personal: painting self-portraits focusing on the “moppiness” of her hair. Now, Dorn wants to create space for maintenance. She defines maintenance as caring for oneself and one’s community, a necessity, not a frill. In her exhibition Fem-utility Closet, she invites you to rest on the ottowomen and take in the humor and absurdity of your surroundings.

Ana Maria Farina and Hanna Washburn

The Animal Within the Animal
October 6- 27, 2024

Ana Maria Farina and Hanna Washburn present The Animal Within the Animal, a vibrant visual conversation that shares the many ways their practices intertwine. Both artists are mothers who use materials associated with the home and femininity to communicate the power and expansiveness of the body. Their distinct visual styles meld to create a collaborative tale, narrating complex corporeal joys and burdens. The works fuse imagery of the body with creatures, highlighting the mammal inside each of us. Plush, comforting textures and familiar domestic patterns
come together to create hybrid forms, simultaneously maternal, familiar, and uncanny. Play is key to this collaboration—exploration and humor exist alongside the weightiness of the subject matter. Everything in the exhibition is in the process of growing and changing: lengthening forms and limbs, reaching out toward a shared understanding. In The Animal Within the Animal, Farina and Washburn create new bodies that are free to be concurrently nurturing, seductive, strange, and distinctly autonomous.

Sarah Reagan

The Kid’s Are Talking
October 5- 27, 2024

Crafted from wood and accented with digital and bioplastic components, The Kids are Talking asserts that contemporary identity, experimentation, and gender deviation are as valuable —’as classic’—as the masterpieces we idolize. This body of work reimagines three iconic images: The Creation of Adam, The Birth of Venus, and David, by evoking the wondrous anarchy of childhood. Using a combination of traditional craft methodologies with modern technology, Reagan challenges the hierarchy of materials and methods. This fusion allows for a dialogue between the past and the present, the rigid and the flexible, the serious and the silly, ultimately questioning what and who is considered ‘worth listening to’ in art and society.

G. Pack

Revenge is the least I deserve
September 7- 29, 2024

Revenge Is The Least I Deserve visually articulates the ongoing cycle of grief and the process of releasing it. The title initially emerged as a response to perceived mistreatment and disrespect, reflecting on G. Pack’s personal struggle to reclaim his dignity and assert his pride. This need to retaliate is not unique to him but is a common reaction to various forms of hurt, from casual misunderstandings to the deep wounds inflicted by systemic racism, emotional abuse, and generational trauma. Through introspection, Pack realized that he deserved much more than the fleeting satisfaction of revenge. Instead, he discovered that he is worthy of love, understanding, and the reciprocal kindness he offers to others. Revenge only consumes valuable time and energy, serving no constructive purpose. This work underscores the importance of moving beyond retribution to embrace a more compassionate and fulfilling existence.

Anne Bouie

At the Equinox
September 7- 29, 2024

At the Equinox includes ceremonial objects and assemblage that reflect upon some time-honored traditions and spirituality of the Fall Equinox, a universally acknowledged season when the sun crosses the equator going from north to south. It represents completion, harvest, and preparation for the dark nights and cold days of winter. Peoples and cultures that have maintained a strong connection with the earth have recognized the equinox as one of the four moments of the sun—the four directions or cardinal points. It is the season of adulthood and the fulfillment of one’s purpose; the acceptance of becoming an elder where many spiritual traditions share stories, traditions, meanings and teachings; and imparting what we know and value ourselves as individuals and a community. Cultural and spiritual aesthetics can be a window into universal themes that acknowledge our original teachers and the Earth and all sentient beings who dwell within it.