Exhibition Archive

Archive
Mel Watkin
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Mel Watkin

Mel Watkin: BIRDLAND

Opening Reception: Friday, February 7, 2025, 5-8pm

The Birdland series is an exhibition of drawings on collaged security envelopes – envelopes used for bills, bank statements and other mailings requiring privacy. Different environments and environmental concerns strongly influence my imagery and the materials I work with.  The Birdland series reflects my recent travels to the mountain west, rust belt cities like St. Louis and the Shawnee National Forest surrounding my home in Southern Illinois. Birds play a role, as our old farmhouse lies along one of the largest migratory bird routes in the country—the Cache River Flyway.

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Denise Bellezzo

Denise Bellezzo

Denise Bellezzo: NEW WORK: ALTERED PAGES

Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 2024, 5-8pm

NEW WORK: ALTERED PAGES is a series of drawings and notations on and of organic images. Using the base imagery to respond to, I can modify, eliminate, or accent patterns and textures. Contour line is applied and masked and applied again to build up layers of information. Book pages, maps, floor plans, aerial photography are all starting points for my process. From these previous images, I respond using additive and subtractive techniques; counteracting , engaging, modifying until a satisfying conclusion is reached. For me, a sense of whimsy is encouraged as a response to the papers. A continuous layering of pattern, line, or textures allows for a formalist structure to be imposed that helps simplify the end result.

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Karen Ami

Karen Ami

Karen Ami: WELL-KEPT RUINS

Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 2024, 5-8pm

Chicago-based artist Karen Ami presents a series of interdisciplinary mosaic works in 'Well-Kept Ruins,' an exhibition addressing brokenness, chaos, and repair in the context of adoption and post-Holocaust generational trauma. These works incorporate inscribed and carved ceramic shards, sculpture, writing, drawing, and collage, an entanglement of her narrative, autoethnographic practice, and art research. This year, several of these selected works were created and exhibited during her PhD dissertation research in Berlin, Germany, the site of maternal and ancestral threads severed by the Holocaust. Ami's works examine feminist identity and familial repair, a re-connection to the remnants and apparitions that remain after loss and disruption. The exhibition's title is inspired by feminist theorist poet Hélène Cixous’s reflective memoir on returning to what remains of the past. The manifestation of these well-kept ruins is about refusing closure, rebuilding imaginary places around the fragments that remain restless yet still before us.

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