2021
Wondering Home
Alivia Blade
Alivia Blade is a visual artist from Louisville, KY. She is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago where she graduated with a BA in graphic design, and created collaborative installation works around memory, childhood and gender performance. Alivia presently explores these themes through sculpture, fashion, design and creative writing.
Artist Statement
wandering home is a collection of explorations I started during quarantine in 2020. At the start of the pandemic, I moved back to Louisville from Chicago to be with family and also decided to begin my solo career as a visual artist. My work explores memory, stories from childhood, and how these experiences presently affect my life. I was drawn to hair tools and products, and began experimenting with synthetic hair, combs and accessories as sculpture. I incorporated other objects found in the home, and created pieces that can be worn on the body as well. These explorations not only function as tools to process past experiences, but they’ve also been a tool of therapy while enduring the isolation of the pandemic. Process has become a very important aspect of my artistic practice. Creating these works has highlighted the way process is not linear. One may revisit the same place several times within a process, and intentions, goals, purpose can shift. There is a surrendering of control which also invites other possibilities into the process. Whether concerning my artistic practice or personal life, this year has offered many invitations to surrender, release, and lean into all the possibilities.
houseguest gallery \ YARDSIDE
YARDSIDE hours______ 24 / 7
gallery hours _______Friday 11-2p \\ Saturday 11-3p
curatorial statement
Industry Fossils & Germinating Sunshine // Kiah Celeste & Mariel Gardner
In Industry Fossils & Germinating Sunshine, houseguest gallery has asked artist Kiah Celeste and activist Mariel Gardner to cultivate an outdoor exhibition (with contributions in the domestic gallery space by Kiah Celeste) that represents their individual contributions and provides an opportunity for change through the creative adaptations that only weather and time will provide.
This collaborative work will remain located and documented (weekly) within YARDSIDE for a calendar year, providing an opportunity for a heuristic study around what happens when ecology gets to edit resources that are provided to it. Similar to the reclamation of space that occurs when maintenance ceases on man-made infrastructure— think trees on abandoned rooftops— Celeste, Gardner, and YARDSIDE will provide material for the collaboration of industrial, designed organic, and the wild.
Kiah Celeste is a multi-dimensional artist born and raised in Brooklyn. Her most recent work transforms industrial and painterly forms into abstraction with unconventional recycled materials, variable color and experimental processes to make three-dimensional works. This practice comes from a self nurtured curiosity and education, although she holds an academic background in photography and art history. The works included in this exhibition are a part of her series I Find This Stable, which works as a study in extracting industrial materials from their typical locations (including but not limited to loading docks of abandoned warehouses and concrete pipe manufacturers) and removing them from entropy—for them to re-enter at another time. Kiah’s conceptual work and research focuses on social stigmas and issues such as the neglect of Black women in America, the lottery business in low income communities, obsession of self in the media, corruption in the medical device industry, and gentrification.
Mariel Gardner is a 38 year old graduate of the University of Louisville and the J. Graham Brown School. She is President of the West Louisville Women's Collaborative where their mission is to create peaceful, artistic spaces in the West End. Mariel is a swimmer, haphazard photographer, knitter, food justice advocate and world traveler. She is also the founder of #ApocolypseAcres, a fully functioning garden built and managed under the ethos of “whatever you have, give it away.” Motivated by a combination of ideas, Mariel has contributed an installation of Black-eyed Susans and Sunflowers. Sunflowers in conjunction with her gorilla plantings of the flower throughout the West End and Black-eyed Susans as a reclamation against the racist history that provided its name. This particular blooming flower is also a reference to her personal history as a native of both Louisville and Baltimore—both of which are coincidentally horse-racing cities.
Industry Fossils will be installed in its current form until September 26th. The installations in YARDSIDE will remain installed until August of 2021. Hopefully we can celebrate a new state of the world at that time with a closing reception.
