stop-loss

I use painting and ceramics as storytelling devices that explore the interconnectedness of my memories surrounding a Midwestern watershed. The works feature imagery such as fish, bobbers, nightcrawlers, and crayfish, alluding to my family’s bait shop and countless hours spent on the water. Developing this body of work has uncovered the tensions that arise in an engagement with the landscape that spans tribal, familial, commercial, and personal histories. The paintings themselves are visceral, dreamlike, nostalgic, and hard to pin down as they navigate a web of memories; they reveal what lingers below the surface.

Weeks before his diagnosis, my father gifted me a box of orange microfiber towels, offering only ​“they’re good to have around” as explanation. I’m sure he meant that, but it was a rather strange gift for a sixteen year old. 

Within six months, he’d died of pancreatic cancer, and I was left with an inexplicable box of rags. Over the years, the towel became a strange sort of background character in my life, the illegible emotions they inspired in me eventually morphing into an uncertain curiosity. Combining audio and installation, Inheritance explores the complicated and unending process of making sense of someone long gone. 

For more information, visit lauramackie.art.

In Flow is an immersive installation and performance exploring American imperialist violence through water, scent, and sound. Featuring a blood-tinged river projection, a red-water fountain, and ceramics playing survivor voices, the exhibition immerses audiences in the unseen yet persistent flow of historical trauma, memory, and trans-Pacific violence that is surging into our living area.

For more information, visit oknoh​.com.

Sailors identify themselves by the ships they’ve inhabited. Ship names are traded like addresses, judged like zip codes. The ships we serve on become so ingrained in our identity, defining who we are. For me, over time, the ship and the memory of the girl I was aboard morphed into one thing. So I revised the dress patterns from my girlhood, and what I offer back is a boat. 

Being transgender is living in uncertainty, in perpetual limbo. Am I a man or a woman? Is my ship sinking or floating? You don’t just come out once, but multiple times. The ship’s imperfect, rough ambivalence speaks to the precarious social water ​“trans” swims in. 

For more information, visit char​liereynoldsstu​dio​.com.

the cut as an arc; as a haptically charged orientation stuck within, yet against; as an ephemeral spark, jolt; as a murmuring syncopation entered into hip first

the installation begins from a night in downtown Cairo, the material traces of flirtatious whispering; a guise of interlocking arms; gripped hands shrouded in a wool coat pocket; the naively indifferent gaze of the police officer we walked by; and the wake of this friend’s passing

the matter of touch to shadow and light; to the void and the particle; to the space and time of state necropolitics;

to the contaminated indeterminacy of queerness as frictional political ontology, whose abrasive affects vibrate at the wayside of the visible; the perceptible; the humanized;

For more information, visit dar​ren​spirk​.com.