Tania Alvarez, Lauren Clay, Rachel Granofsky, Ann Toebbe, Rachael Zur
CHART is pleased to present Home Works, a group exhibition featuring work by Tania Alvarez, Lauren Clay, Rachel Granofsky, Ann Toebbe, and Rachael Zur. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, April 6, from 6–8 pm, and the exhibition will remain on view through May 6, 2023.
How do you know a home when you see it? Do you just feel it? Simply contemplating the word, what appears in your mind’s eye? The answers are deeply personal, and likely have evolved over time. Homes are unique amalgamations of places and things, lived memories and moments that flood and define rooms. Day after day, year after year, we shape and reshape these spaces, adding our lives to their lineages, and they, in turn, become our worlds. As we build and imprint on them, homes in turn serve as the personalized settings for our own growth and development.
Home Works gathers artists who examine the architecture of our intimate surroundings and explore how those structures inform the personas we construct for ourselves. Whether it’s a glowing threshold, an illusory figure’s silhouette, or recreations of familial furnishings, the images in Home Works — crafted from a variety of materials and processes — speak to the physical remainders of lives lived in domestic spaces, as well as to the malleability of our homes and, by extension, the people who occupy them.
If our internal reference points are informed by personal history—by the places we’ve seen and been—then everything we can imagine is shaped by where we’ve spent our time. This exhibition considers these ever-shifting frameworks—because, after long enough, we become where we’ve lived.
How do you know a home when you see it? Do you just feel it? Simply contemplating the word, what appears in your mind’s eye? The answers are deeply personal, and likely have evolved over time. Homes are unique amalgamations of places and things, lived memories and moments that flood and define rooms. Day after day, year after year, we shape and reshape these spaces, adding our lives to their lineages, and they, in turn, become our worlds. As we build and imprint on them, homes in turn serve as the personalized settings for our own growth and development.
Home Works gathers artists who examine the architecture of our intimate surroundings and explore how those structures inform the personas we construct for ourselves. Whether it’s a glowing threshold, an illusory figure’s silhouette, or recreations of familial furnishings, the images in Home Works — crafted from a variety of materials and processes — speak to the physical remainders of lives lived in domestic spaces, as well as to the malleability of our homes and, by extension, the people who occupy them.
If our internal reference points are informed by personal history—by the places we’ve seen and been—then everything we can imagine is shaped by where we’ve spent our time. This exhibition considers these ever-shifting frameworks—because, after long enough, we become where we’ve lived.
Ann Toebbe toys with record keeping by way of recreation, piecing together fragments of remembered domestic spaces, often those family and friends. Her overhead vantages create flattened picture planes made from gouache and paper collage on wood panels that resemble dollhouses or embellished blueprints, each crafted from extensively planned preparatory drawings. Similarly, Rachel Granofsky recreates collapsed interiors, though hers are pictorially flattened via photographic lens. While they may immediately appear to be superficially embellished surfaces, closer inspection reveals the imperfections and seams of her sculptural process, as the manipulated spaces and furniture that have been reworked with paint and tape slowly appear.
Lauren Clay’s sculptural wall works allude to Neo-classical architecture, as columns and arches emerge from dream-like, illusionistic space. Sturdy stairwells emerge from carved curvatures and wisps of smoke, begging the viewer, like the constructions, to declare their footing before engaging with her airy landscapes. Rachael Zur also expands the depths of her paintings as she recasts quotidian items from the living spaces of cherished family members. Drawing on remembrances of rooms and their Proustian sensorial qualities, Zur turns to the power of tactility in conjuring memories of others from the objects that remain behind.
Each of Tania Alvarez’s works acts as something of an abstracted self-portrait, as the artist turns recollections and lived experiences into mixed-media interior spaces. Window-like forms evoke narratives of isolation, though their changing imagery intimates an ability to control how our own stories are told.
Lauren Clay’s sculptural wall works allude to Neo-classical architecture, as columns and arches emerge from dream-like, illusionistic space. Sturdy stairwells emerge from carved curvatures and wisps of smoke, begging the viewer, like the constructions, to declare their footing before engaging with her airy landscapes. Rachael Zur also expands the depths of her paintings as she recasts quotidian items from the living spaces of cherished family members. Drawing on remembrances of rooms and their Proustian sensorial qualities, Zur turns to the power of tactility in conjuring memories of others from the objects that remain behind.
Each of Tania Alvarez’s works acts as something of an abstracted self-portrait, as the artist turns recollections and lived experiences into mixed-media interior spaces. Window-like forms evoke narratives of isolation, though their changing imagery intimates an ability to control how our own stories are told.
Tania Alvarez (b. 1983, Seville, Spain) earned her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2017 and BFA at Pratt Institute in 2005.
Alvarez’s mixed media works, with their textured surfaces and collaged materials, serve as slant metaphors for our own accumulations of experience. Drawn from the artist’s memories of places and events, the scenes in her works capture moments of contemplation and self-abstraction.
Her work has been exhibited at Miriam Gallery Brooklyn, NY, (solo); Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; McNay Museum Print Fair, San Antonio, TX; Golden Artists Colors, New Berlin, NY; The Clinton Foundation, Harlem, NY; The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY; Delphian Gallery, London, UK; and Belard Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal among others. Alvarez’s works are in the permanent collections of the University Art Museum at the University at Albany and the Boise City Department of Arts and History in Idaho. Alvarez was an artist-in-residence at the James Castle House in Boise, ID; The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in New Berlin, NY; The Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. She is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and currently works in Catskill, NY.
Lauren Clay (b. 1982, Atlanta, GA) toys with the physical and the virtual; her process of working is a dance between the two which combines painting, sculpture, architecture, and design to re-envision their potential for spatial contrast, fantasy, and confusion.
Nothing is quite what seems with Clay’s work. She’s covered gallery walls in massive digitally printed enlargements of hand-marbleized works on paper and employed other techniques to distort spaces and sculptures. Her newest relief wall works seemingly turn dreamscapes into realities, as the artist translates the psychic into the physical.
Her process transforms small collages of hand-marbled paper into an immersive floor-to-ceiling environment which she creates digitally, and then translates back into a physical space; or in this instance: a virtual space. The wallpaper installations acquire a double layer of illusionistic yet improbable spaces floating on a background of seemingly never-ending undulating stripes of colour.
Clay received a BFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, and MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Bosse & Baum, London, UK, Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas TX, and KDR305, Miami.
Rachel Granofsky (b. 1980, Montreal, Canada) creates photographs that conceal her clever methods of transforming interior spaces by recasting real estate slideshow carousels and turning domestic detritus into religious iconography. Contrasting our regularly voracious appetite for imagery, Granofsky almost challenges the viewer to reverse engineer her curious assemblages.
Using materials such as paint, charcoal, and tape, and working directly on surfaces of architecture, furniture, and household objects, the artist reshapes domestic environments for the fixed view of the camera lens. Marks are positioned to blur the foreground with the background, creating a sense that the final photograph has been painted over, when in fact it is the space itself that has been manipulated. Upon close inspection of each print, brush strokes and tape seams reveal themselves, and the tactile process that goes into collapsing pictorial space is exposed. These photographs are not intended to trick so much as slow down the viewing process. They encourage viewers to linger over handmade imperfections and engage in a way of seeing that is antithetical to the everyday consumption of digital photography.
Granofsky received her BFA in Photography from Pratt Institute, New York, in 2003 and her MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2013. She has exhibited in group shows in South Africa, Germany, Sweden, Canada, the U.S.A. and Brazil, and was awarded artist residencies at Lighthouse Works (2018), Ox- Bow (2017), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2015) and Greatmore Studios, South Africa (2011).
Ann Toebbe (b. 1974, Cincinnati, OH) lives and works in Chicago. Despite the fixed and occasionally contradictory perspectives that populate her paintings, Toebbe’s works never feel out of the ordinary. In fact, the way she charmingly flattens recreations of friends’ and families’ homes make them feel all that much more real and full of storylines and histories that hinted at but only partly revealed to us.
Like pages from a diary, the artist’s past or present, Toebbe records the architecture of current and former domestic environments. These are meticulously flattened, often merging the view from above with a dead on center view. The interiors are reconsidered through Toebbe’s extensive drawing, plotting, cutting and pasting of various elements synthesized into a cohesive whole. Fragments of memories, knitted together, in these unfolded, dollhouse-like, unpopulated rooms, reveal a dynamic 3-D dimension within their static presentation, not dissimilar to a Mandala.
Toebbe received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1997. She earned an MFA in painting from Yale University in 2004, and a DAAD Scholarship to the Universität der Kunst, Berlin in 2004-05.
Rachael Zur (b. 1980, Albany, OR) lives and works in Portland, OR. Shaping and molding her sculptural, mixed media works, she crafts tactile materials objects that bear a resemblance to items from the domestic lives of persons close to the artist. This sort of aesthetic forensics highlights how memories of those no longer with us can live on in the things and places they once held and inhabited.
Traces of us linger in the physical world, even in our absence. There is an evocative nature to domestic objects and spaces—items within homes hold the residual energy of lives lived long after people are gone. Zur’s work depicts ordinary objects from living rooms which hold the remaining radiance and tenderness of the departed, working with materials that have weight to them to ground ephemeral concepts into an artwork that is physically solid and fixed. The artwork holds the ideas and feelings which are light and almost impossible to contain—similar to how homes can hold the lingering domestic presence of the departed. Contour lines move across the surface of the works like phantoms; other times a contour line defines the edge of a work, (articulating a wing or hand), as a fully present body.
Zur received her MFA in 2019 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited her work locally and nationally in places such as: SOIL Gallery Seattle, WA; Artworks Northwest Biennial at Umpqua Valley Arts Association, Roseburg OR Stone House Art Gallery in Charlotte, NC; and with Young Space. Her work is published in New American Paintings, Under The Bridge Magazine, and Stay Home by Stay Home Gallery and Residency. Zur currently resides in the greater Portland Oregon metropolitan area with her husband and their three children.
Installation views at CHART. Photos by Elisabeth Bernstein.
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ALL ART WORKS COPYRIGHT THE ARTIST
ALL ART WORKS COPYRIGHT THE ARTIST