Feb 28 - March 31, 2024

Opening Reception: Friday, March 1, 6-8 pm

 “What We Make for Ourselves
and Lie In”
Club Curate, SMFA Students

”I Chose These Things”
Cathy Osman

“What We Make for Ourselves
and Lie In ”
Club Curate, SMFA Students

 (Sponsored by the SMFA Student Government ) 

Curated By Club Curate at SMFA (Ivy Lockhart, Julia Petrocelli, Terry Cole, Asja Mijovic, Elan Cohen)

Artists
Miguel Caba
Anneke Chan
Anastasia Glass
Luc Grenier
Edward Hans (Hankie Journal)
Quinn/Marzipan Hoerner
Megann Lawlor
Zelda Rohrbach Mayer
Pearl Shread
Fiona Jacobson-Yang

 We started this exhibition looking for work in the spirit of Tracy Emin’s installation of her bed in the Tate Gallery London in 1998, “My Bed.” Practices of the self, by the self, and for the public, concerning in part the production and collection of material not intended for exhibition, but recontextualized as personal ready-made.

Take Fiona Jacobson-Yang’s video work “Don't Get Rid of It,” where endless personal trinkets do acrobatics across the screen; Anneke Chan’s clementines, which mold into increasingly fantastical colors; the ketchup-stain painting of Ed Hans; or the dirty clothes that constitute the form of Megann Lawlor’s chair.

What We Make for Ourselves and Lie In creates a spatialized relationship between the intimate space of the bedroom and the public one of the gallery. This spatialized intimacy informs choices such as Pearl Shread’s “Good Boy,” which consists of a box around the work, preserving opacity unless the viewer chooses to engage as a voyeur; Miguel Caba’s lenticular prints in which you are forced to move around and to lose part of the image to see the rest; or Luc Grenier’s video essays which must navigate bodies across more than one screen.

Moreover, the question of intimate relations as creative production was a necessary element in Tracey Emin’s “My Bed,” be that the interspecies intimacy of Zelda Rohrbach Mayer’s “Untitled (scroll)”; Anastasia Glass’s quilt of transactional love; or Quinn Hoerner’s palimpsestic ball-gag manifesto on subversion, art, and sex.

Sometimes we make for ourselves intentionally, and sometimes art is what we shed around our rooms and hold onto. 

”I Chose These Things”
Cathy Osman

The foundation of my work grows from a deep connection to my surroundings. As a painter and printmaking living in Southern Vermont I am attentive to the landscape’s inherent character. My studio practice is a synthesis of observations, the particularity of materials, and a need to re-invent what I see through the process of making.  In all I strive to reconsider the appearance of things.

Until recently my work was collage based, constructed primarily using materials surfaced and printed on a press. With this raw material, texture and color I created a substratum made dense with an overlays of mark, color and  shape. This practice has influenced my current still life paintings which focus on the observed and invented structure of flowers, plants and an assemblage of still life objects. 

During the pandemic I felt the need to focus my attention on flowers which could provide some comfort.  Still-life painting can be a celebration of sorts - a pleasure taken by the character of “things” and a reminder of the transience and impermanence of the observed moment.