Past Exhibitions 2023
Alicia Little is a visual artist from Cincinnati, Ohio currently based in Detroit, Michigan. Rooted in feminist sculpture and painting, her work is centered on the relationships between color, shape and form, and often addresses interior surroundings. Interested in the conditions between pictorial space and flatness, she works in various modes including drawing, painting, video, sculpture, and installation. Recent exhibitions include PADA, Barreiro, Portugal, Holland Projects, Reno, NV, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, South Korea, and Alternate Projects in Cincinnati, OH. Little has been awarded several grants for travel and contemporary art research and has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center and PADA Studios in Barreiro, Portugal.
Exhibition Statement
Beginning in 2020, I have been making a series of drawings on colored paper as a part of my daily studio practice. The drawings begin with one line that loops and intersects itself several times, creating a grid-like framework. The distorted grids, which never reproduce exactly the same, form a scaffolding that gets filled in with dense and tactile oil pastel. I view the drawings as explorations between color interactions, structure, texture, physicality and composition.
Interested in the various color relationships formed throughout this body of work, the drawings are partly an ongoing research practice on how colors appear to shift depending on what color they are placed next to. How many variations can there be? How can these cyclical and loosely systematic forms interact with the straight lines in an architectural space? In this exhibition, drawings are juxtaposed with ceramic sculptures and tufted textiles. The sculptures, more structured forms that attempt a perfect grid but inevitably slump, interact in the space together with the drawings and tufted textiles. The tufted textiles are continuations of the drawings, bringing these patterns into dimensional forms and onto the floor.
Sara Olshansky is a working artist based in Louisville, Kentucky. She graduated from Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville in 2018 with two degrees in 2D Studio Art, Art History and a minor in Spanish Language. There, she received numerous awards and grants from the university, supporting her two thesis projects and travels. In 2017, she attended Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she participated in contemporary Spanish, fine art practices and engaged with international art institutions across Europe. Olshansky is interested in exploring the manipulation of imagery on a picture plane and how this technique might mirror the construction and perception of lived experience. Olshansky is included in several private and public collections and has exhibited across the region.
Artist Statement
Memory defines human perception of the world. We draw upon past experiences to interpret the present and predict possible futures–we rely on it to inform paths forward, to explain new phenomena, and to relate to others. It is the foundation of our biases but also necessary to foster and retain knowledge. While memory inhabits such a vital role in the way individuals identify and make sense of the world, it is flawed and imperfect. Memories degrade; they change each time they’re called up into the present, taking on new lives and meanings; they can morph together, disappear completely, they can even be untrue, fabricated without our realizing. Although we seem to collectively accept that memories are fluid and that they can fail, we also at once hold our own memories as implicitly trusted records of fact. In this way, human relationships with memory are immensely complicated, so a look into memories and how they function in our worlds is also a look into the human mind, a way to understand our larger flaws.
This body of work draws upon a cherished collection of photographs of my home garden over several years. These photographs begin as material for completing a series of paintings, drawings, and sculptures, which unravel and stretch those photographed moments as they are manipulated. These gestures are a futile attempt at preservation but elucidate the shape-shifting nature of remembering, forgetting, and the acts in between. What would it feel like if you could pull the past from the mind and hold it? What would it look like? As the body of work progresses, a connection between nature's cycles and memories' lives becomes apparent. Plants and memories grow and decay, both dynamic and dormant, they can bear fruit or invade, but most importantly, as they whither, which they inevitably do, they fertilize the grounds for richer experiences to take place on the site of their decay. In this way, instead of representing a loss, the imperfections or the fading of memories can signify constant progression forward toward new participations, new meanings, and new life.
a group show of works contributed by musicians associated with Louisville, Kentucky’s underground music scene.
co-curated by houseguest gallery & brett eugene ralph of surface noise
Camouflage, as we know it now, was theorized and introduced into the military lexicon upon the research of artists such as Abbott Thayer and Norman Wilkinson during World Wars I and II. These attempts to conceal troops from, at first other soldiers on the ground, later morphing into tactical patterns to block visibility of troop movement from the sky and sea, became as useful as they were a symbiotic indicator of the relationship between visibility, safety, and technology. Thayer, a Romantic painter of angels and a naturalist who first published ideas regarding concealing coloration in the wild, worked on collages and stitched massive textiles in large groups explicitly for military concealment. Thus, the birth of camouflage shares its birthright with that of artists.
Camouflage has since then been used everywhere, from myriad militias to high fashion. In In The Weeds: Camouflage and Its Discontents at houseguest gallery, we gaze at artists using camouflage as we traditionally recognize it, actively camouflaging or concealing information, camouflaging for the sake of safely educating the public, and as artists announcing a form of concealment--allowing it to become known and thus visible again.
Please read Nathanial Hendrickson’s review of “In the Weeds,” published in Ruckus this January. Hendrickson navigates “In the Weeds” as a liaison for an engaging conversation with artistic researcher and theorist, Gian Luigi Biagini