A Ground to Stand, a Place to Call

These artists obscure, muddle and occasionally reveal the complexities of our relationship with land, memory, and the passage of time. Through mark making and the rendering of imagery through light and dark, the work examines reality vs. abstraction to reveal imagery that is thinly spread between being available/ inaccessible, complete/disassembled, and transparent/opaque. Though vastly different in their material approach, each artist finds commonality in their quest to pin down what lies between.

For Gabrielle Constantine, this displacement is outlined within her sculptural work of her relationship with her diasporic background and growing up in the restaurant industry. Through paintings of the female figure and veiled landscapes, Rowan Howe centers around memory and the sexualized self. Alex Freyre uses virtual reality, with the participation of the audience, to create unique real-time experiences in a simulated computerized environment. With her environmental portraits, Jennifer Teresa Villanueva documents the flux of her family’s domestic life. Sarah Chess interrogates the production of labor and ritual by illustrating optical illusions and pixelation imagery.