The Stamps Gallery Pillar Project: Fore-Site (Phase One)

From September 2025 through August 2026, Stamps Gallery is partnering in a curatorial collaboration with two Ypsilanti-based, artist-run project spaces led by Stamps alumni: C.Y.N.K. Studios, directed by Sally Clegg (Lecturer III and Student Exhibition Coordinator, MFA ​’20) and Abhishek Narula (MFA ​’20); and Sometimes Space, directed by Nathan Byrne (Lecturer I, MFA ​’21). Each space hosts dozens of artists annually for exhibitions, performances, and events, fostering experimental work and building community. For this project, Byrne, Clegg, and Narula have been commissioned to reimagine the pillars on Division Street that flank the gallery. In response, they’ve curated six artists to create new work for the pillars over three cycles:

• Phase 1 (September 12 — December 12) artists: Amelia Burns (Cranbrook MFA ​’23) and Erin McKenna (MFA ​’20)
• Phase 2 (January 12 — April 12) artists: Sally Clegg (MFA ​’20) and Kim Karlsrud (MFA ​’20)
• Phase 3 (May 12 — August 12) artists: Abhishek Narula (MFA ​’20) and Nathan Byrne (MFA ​’21)

Phase 1 Curatorial Statement

Curated by Sometimes Space: Amelia Burns (entry pillar)
Curated by CYNK Studios: Erin McKenna (courtyard pillar)

Artists Amelia Burns and Erin McKenna reimagine the Division Street pillars through digital collages rooted in memory, landscape and shared environments. Burns arranges fragments of her own photographs into airy compositions where these pictorial remnants become enshrined by the artist’s vision of the sacred. McKenna draws from the language of quilting, organizing her photos of mushrooms, moss and lichen into vibrant geometric patterns which echo Ohio textile traditions. Both artists, Midwestern women attentive to the nuances of place, weave personal imagery into collective meaning. Together, their works create spaces of reverence and connection.

Amelia Burns: GODSPROMISESRISINGHIGH
GODSPROMISESRISINGHIGH contains fragments of photographs I have made over years in various locations in the United States. Each fragment holds personal meaning for me. The exalted pieces of environments float together and create a visual smörgåsbord of symbols, denoting a capitalist world, filled with tender moments and connections, where all objects are made holy.

Erin McKenna: Mushroom Trail
Mushroom Trail reimagines the Ohio Star quilt block through a collage of photographs of mushrooms, lichen, and moss gathered during walks in my Appalachian forest home. I created small blocks of repeating patterns to build texture and color. Inspired by the Barn Quilt Trail, the work honors Ohio’s yard art traditions. Like other local expressions, from chainsaw-carved bears to the front porch goose, it fosters a shared sense of pride of place, and community.

Artist Statements/​Bios

Amelia Burns
Through my travels across nearly every U.S. state, I document not only the natural world but also its entanglement with human influence. My work speaks to the loneliness, humor, beauty, pain, and joy that coexist within these spaces. The landscapes I create — whether photographic or collage-based — are imbued with a visceral connection to the physical environments I’ve passed through. They are a reprocessing of the cultural detritus that surrounds me, transforming fragments into vignettes that explore both the darkness and resilience of humanity.

At its core, my work explores the underworld of human experience, grappling with the visceral tension between authenticity and artifice in contemporary Americana. It reflects the disgusting horror of capitalism, the mysticism of my Irish Catholic upbringing, and the profound solitude that fuels my process. The resulting images are landscapes of seeking, filled with the pain, glory, and quiet resistance of life.

Amelia Burns is a photographer, collage artist, curator and educator exploring the cultural and physical landscapes of the U.S., capturing the nuances of shared environments. She earned her BFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2005 and later completed her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2023.
Website / Instagram

Erin McKenna
Erin McKenna is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in sculpture. Her practice embraces humor, playful misuse, and celebration as strategies to dismantle stereotypes and complicate binaries of construction and embellishment. With a feminist lens, she explores the space where necessity meets excess, highlighting the subversive potential of both. Her sculptures often pair gritty building materials with tactile fabrics, generating tension between utility and ornament. Growing up in a perpetually unfinished home — a place of sawdust, chop saws, and improvisation — instilled in her a respect for visible labor, inventive problem-solving, and imperfection. Her process follows personal rules:

• no hierarchy of materials
• subvert expected use
• complicate binaries, stereotypes and associations
• misuse, misapply
• allow for variable arrangements
• repeat, reiterate, reuse
• consider the subversive possibilities of the excessive, fantastic, and necessary
• always let the labor be visible

McKenna earned her BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design in 2012 and later completed her MFA at Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. She recently moved back to the forest she calls home in Southeastern Ohio, where she serves as Exhibitions Director at The Dairy Barn Arts Center, hunts for mushrooms with her toddler, and makes quilts.
Website / Instagram