Open gallery
In this series, Ironic Treasures, Julia Canfield explores the ironic beauty and luminosity of single-use shopping bags by engaging with ideas of nature versus humanity, and how we distance ourselves from nature, and vice versa. Canfield studies the forms, textures, and transparencies of plastic bags, highlighting their strange allure through abstraction. In order to express the global implications of plastic waste, many of the paintings’ compositions are inspired by maps of areas which either produce or suffer from high levels of plastic pollution. Through this work, viewers may confront not only the landfill we have made of our world, but the complex emotions which arise from the fatal paradox of humanity’s disgust and fascination with consumerism.
Christine Gutierrez’s audience-interactive exhibition, Between the Lines, is comprised of several sets of three to four comic-book-styled sequential panels that tell different narratives. Influenced by studies in semiotics and the pop-art movement of the 1950s, Gutierrez poses visual questions about the current challenges of navigating media bias, clickbait, and the misreading that results from missing or disconnected information.
Voidpunk Utopia is a drawing exhibition by Summer Rodgers featuring works in ink and charcoal that address underrepresented experiences of media and consumerism. Rodgers explores the desires and connections between queer and autistic identity in works that reimagine everyday objects, communal experience, and modes of self expression as fantasies of a better life. This in turn embraces the idea that a society’s ability to change is beholden to cultural limits of imagination.