Join us for the unveiling of two new exhibitions at the Handwerker Gallery on Thursday, November 1, 5-7 p.m.!
Solo exhibitions by faculty artists Carla Stetson (Art, Education) and Lin Price (Art, '90) each position the gallery visitor in dialogue with the pictorial subjects of their serial works, rupturing the confines of the picture plane. Stetson's work examines the thin edge between humans and animals, while Lin Price's paintings center on the borders and relationships between neighbors in rural communities.
Human Nature: Carla Stetson Animals serve a multiplicity of functions for humans: pets, food, clothing, medicine, proxies, aides, symbols of power or industriousness, and more. Their role in relation to humans, who are, after all, animals themselves, is a murky and highly contested ground. While we revere some animals, we loathe and fear others, and pay no attention to many. Carla Stetson’s recent work raises questions about animal and human interdependency, how we imagine animals to be, and what they mean to us as we consider the natural/cultural/societal issues of the world we share. Uncanny compositions depict wild animals within domestic interior spaces where they do not belong: nesting within a braided rug, stuck under an overstuffed chair, flitting against floral wallpaper. Defying standard human convention of barricading wild things outside our homes, here they are invited inside and fed from the table. Narratives arise, psychoses are explored, and power struggles ensue in the border ecology of Stetson’s imaginative dreamscape. Broken Ground: Lin Price A paved road cuts across a muddy field, bisected by a set of garish painted yellow lines. Electrical wires timidly scratch the span of a stark cloudless sky. Dry unmowed grass whispers against the shell of a rusted truck in a front yard. Punctuated with wells, septic tanks, and fences these are the fractured rural scenes of remorse and remedy that Lin Price focuses on with her newest body of work. Price describes her studio practice as a pursuit to ‘reveal bone’, guided by the intimacy of slowly layered painting and stripped-back compositions. With one foot in both worlds, the artist carefully selects liminal picture-panes for the viewer to peer through. Her serial paintings consistently negotiate this position as mediator, resulting in fractured vignettes or portraits of shifting ground. The characters in her paintings linger through these landscapes, possessed with their own mysterious and noble inner worlds, ambivalent of the viewer’s gaze. The resulting compositions are haunted and strange, depicting the harsh truths, stubborn tenacity, and indeterminate future of life in rural Upstate New York.