SHARING SPACE

Sharing Space brings together artists with diverse creative practices and life experiences to explore themes of intimacy, distance, connection, and comfort. Using sound, touch, and sight to activate our senses, their works challenge us to imagine possibilities for making space for ourselves and others in the face of personal and societal transformation.

This exhibition is an invitation to reflect on strategies for bridging distances and impassible divides or, alternatively, for finding one’s own space in a crowd. Photographs by Chen and Kirk express this tension. Their works convey experiences of searching for camaraderie in a sparsely populated landscape and communion with nature in the midst of a city. The natural world itself becomes a space of transformation in Thomas’s presentation of nature as therapy and in the paintings of DeBoard, where wild creatures reveal hidden chaos and the potential for renewal at the edges of our ordered domains. The material world, too, plays a critical role in the way we inhabit space and engage with one another. The objects designed by Martin and Johnson evoke familiar household objects—a table, a chair, a coat hanger—but invite surprising modes of interaction that challenge ideas of comfort. Ferguson’s and Isenbarger’s sculptures express rupture and reinvention in the heart of domesticity. In their multimedia works, Gupit, Terzieva, and Buie use artistic strategies of visual fragmentation, erasure, and accumulation to access and reconstruct spaces that only exist in memory. And finally, the works of Schnettler, Spears, and Thomas give us access to private moments and personal spaces, encouraging human connection through empathy.

Artists:
Tyanna J. Buie, Yiyun Chen, Rachel DeBoard, Jason J. Ferguson, Nicolei Buendia Gupit, Stacy Isenbarger, Breanne Johnson, Elise Kirk, Elise Marie Martin, AJ Schnettler, Kat Spears, Dessislava Terzieva, and Rachel Elise Thomas