2022 Solo, Small Group, & Invitational Exhibitions
Faces of Southern Africa
By Robert Bolla
September 23 - October 15, 2022
On Display in our Curated Gallery
Faces of Southern Africa an exhibition of photos showing images of peoples of southern Africa including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, and Namibia. I want this exhibition to help viewers understand that while there are differences in cultures, we are all the same people wanting to live a safe and productive part of our culture and the world.
TarArt - From the Streets of Saint Louis
By Barbara Marshall
September 23 - October 15, 2022
On Display in our Ramp Gallery
It’s been proven that viewing and attempting to analyze and recognize what you are looking at, stimulates the brain that works hard to make sense of the visual information it is receiving. The human brain will try to discern familiarity and meaning from the patterns and shapes it sees. An example of this is when people see shapes in the clouds.
Seventeen thousand years ago, humans painted realistic images of people, deer, horses, and other animals on the walls of caves. Today, many of these same images emerge unplanned when workers are filling cracks and holes with tar on the streets.
Each time I photograph an image that I see on a street, sidewalk, or parking lot, it is because I see what looks to me like a dog, a bird, a person, trees, an interesting scene or abstract. Often the texture of the street surface itself or of the exposed aggregate, add surprising texture and color to my photographs. I’ve begun to add a little color by inking the photos to accent and identify the image that I see. There is so much out there on the streets of Saint Louis, waiting to be seen by those who look down at the TarArt world under their feet.
Cupcake, 2022, screenprint, 16” x 12”
Most Good
by Candice Corgan
August 19 - September 17, 2022
On Display in our Curated Gallery
My favorite part of any celebration is that one helium balloon that gets left floating around on the ceiling - drifting across a home for weeks until it slowly starts to ground itself back to earth: back to reality. By then the festivities have long since passed, yet there is something bittersweet about a shiny, foil, floating reminder of happier times as it shrinks into a deflated blob. A dueling dialog of optimism and melancholy. And although the balloon has become somber it gains personality - peeking around corners and sneaks up when you least expect it. Then one day your new housemate finally reaches the floor, finds a nice corner and surrenders.
My work highlights the absurdity found in the mundane; using humor and play to discuss the bleak realities about our contemporary culture. I look at the fine line between the dualities of joy and boredom. Dreams and reality. Hope and failed expectations. Through playful interaction and whimsy, I analyze a culture of affirmation and distraction. My current studio practice involves human observation, found image, amateur photography, material play, ready-mades and taking more steps than necessary to get to a simple gesture. Using my own experience and byway of observational research, I draw references from contemporary human experiences. I look at how we interact in the world. I use absurd means to approach the bittersweet. I search for meaning in nothing.
Selections From The 9INHANDPRESS 2022 Seventh Annual Print Exchange 2022
August 19 - September 17, 2022
On Display in our Ramp Gallery
Since its inception in 2015, the 9INHANDPRESS International Print Exchange has built on generations of printmakers and print artists in the democracy of printmaking as a means of putting more original artworks into more hands. To that end, the 9INHANDPRESS International Print Exchange has engaged nearly 600 printmakers in an international swap of some 8,880 pieces of printed art. Inviting student, novice, hobby, emerging and professional printmakers, this Exchange is the largest international print exchange not affiliated with an academic or art institution.
With print techniques spanning across the entirety of printing language – from relief and intaglio, screen print, lithography, letterpress, transfer processes...and many more—the Exchange showcases how artists work within the space of contemporary printmaking; each artist approaching the un-themed exchange from a perspective of sharing their work to a largely unknown audience. Printmaking, for its many hundreds of years, has existed as a community that comes together around a press or in a printshop. Printshops have been a hub of sharing—not just space, but language, imagery, storytelling, technique and time—all of which is an invaluable part of printmaking. Shops and presses have existed as spaces for artists and printmakers to collaborate; for non-printmakers to dabble; for painters, sculptors, ceramicists, graphic designers and non-artists to meet with Master Printers, Collaborative Printers, and Teaching Printers to create print-based work. Any exchange is an extension of this hub of sharing and collaboration. The Exchange furthers the dialogue between and among printmakers. As the world still finds itself emerging from a global pandemic amid new -and renewed- local and global turmoil, how do printmakers create? What does our dialogue look like now?
Selections from the 9INHANDPRESS Seventh Annual International Print Exchange highlights just 80 works (of nearly 200) submitted to the 2022 Exchange. The printsfeatured are works of students as young as eighth grade, to prints made by makers many years their senior, each showcasing a unique approach to printmaking. The 9INHANDPRESS Annual International Print Exchange has built and strengthened connections across borders, language barriers and time, and will continue to provide printmakers the means to continue this dialogue for years to come.
Collected Fragments
By Catherine Morgan and Victoria Miener
July 1 - August 6, 2022
On Display in our Curated Gallery
Collected Fragments is a group of mixed media works (with the focus being on clay) by ceramicists Catherine Morgan and Victoria Miener.
Victoria Miener uses found objects as stamps. She explores both functional and sculptural forms, and draws from “memory objects” which capture moments of her life in the clay’s surface. Miener’s approach to recording memory on the surface of her work is evocative of the idea that any object can have a lasting impression, even if it may be as trivial as a piece of string. She invites the viewer to leave behind objects to add to the “memory objects”.
Catherine Morgan fires glass collected from polluted creeks into the surfaces of her work, directly connecting them with the issues which negatively impact amphibians. Morgan’s work discusses environmental impacts on amphibians, and more specifically, species which are local and endemic to Saint Louis or Missouri, as well as across the United States. Morgan’s use of biomorphic forms, color, and the material used (porcelain) directly speaks to detrimental environmental impacts on amphibians. Her found objects are fossils from her father’s collection which are found in the Missouri/Illinois region, and other mixed media elements seek to evoke the feeling of looking closely at the details that are abundant in nature.
Working in clay and paper, these artists work with natural elements, organic shapes, and found objects. However, the meaning and intentions of their work discuss different themes. Victoria Miener discusses memory and how found objects can impact ones recollection. The surfaces of her work have been textured with some of these found objects, meant to be a representation of the impression which memory leaves. Through the abstraction of surfaces (using objects as stamps) Miener explores the literal impression that memory has; through mixed media and organic surface textures, Morgan uses biomorphic shapes and materials such as porcelain to discuss human impact on the environment and the importance of amphibians.
Stitchin’
July 1 - August 6, 2022
On Display in our Ramp Gallery
The St. Louis Artists’ Guild is proud to present Stitchin’, an invitational exhibition featuring work by Suzy Farren, Nancy Grimes, Kelly Larson, and Debra Lewis. Each artist utilizes the medium of fiber and explores unique approaches to the medium to talk about various themes and topics.
Fractured
By Nabil Mousa
May 20 - June 18, 2022
On Display in our Curated Gallery
Nabil Mousa is an openly gay, Arab-American man originally from Syria, where his sexuality left him vulnerable to harassment and victimization. Channeling this sense of abandonment and rejection into his work as an interdisciplinary artist, Mousa has spent his entire career creating very personal, powerful installations and artworks around hope, healing, and survival, no matter what ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or whatever else might exist outside the norms of society. The distressing image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washing up dead on the shores of the Mediterranean while fleeing Syria in 2017 brought the stakes of his work into vivid terms. What’s most important is everyone’s safety and happiness—not material goods, not making more money, not the need for more things; if anything, all of these desires don’t replace boredom. They are irrelevant.
This insight inspired a new body of work, Fractured, which he began in earnest that same year; he decided to rummage around abandoned warehouses for material to appropriate. He found a piece of old plywood left exposed to the sun, rain, and wind. When he started to pull on it, the wood began fracturing and crumbling in his hands, and he smiled at the beauty of these humble, composite pieces. While he wasn’t sure what he’d do with them, eventually these pieces would end up on wood panels, along with rusted nuts and bolts, wires, broken cups, and other building material. Like the plywood, these objects were made of many pieces, yet the aesthetic leaned “less is more,” with heavy gesso, staples, and white paint turning the surface into a kind of clean monochrome. In all, he made five works like these. Having no venue to show them, Mousa put them in storage.
After moving to Seattle for his husband’s job in 2018, Mousa went camping in the woods, where he found pieces of driftwood in a river, rekindling his Fractured project anew; working with these objects in his Columbus, Ohio studio, Mousa noticed burlap laying on the floor, which he decided to incorporate into his series, as well as paper bags from Trader Joes and Whole Foods. He ripped them into smaller pieces and collaged them onto canvas. Gesso, wood, then paint were layered onto the surface. In working with and analyzing these materials, Mousa realized that we are all, in a way, adrift like his humble wooden flotsam, trying to find supportive communities to settle with. How we do such a thing is the ultimate question.
Website: https://nabilmousa.com
Ambient Life
By Jasmine Raskas
May 20 - June 18, 2022
On Display in our Ramp Gallery and Window on Jackson Ave
I work with paint, sculpture, and assemblage to explore patterns found in natural growth, form, and collective systems. I’m fascinated by the mathematical rules that govern the emergence of physical structures and information-based systems. For example, the same branching patterns are found in the distribution of rivers, networks of neurons, a strike of lightning, and the growth of a tree. These patterns matter to me because of how they re-occur across multiple levels of scale, appearing in both microscopic and macroscopic imagery. My art practice is informed by my education in the fields of medicine and biotechnology. As I create work, I collect images on everything from histology slides to ancient rituals. Rather than researching a specific, predetermined idea, I gather collections of images and allow for a pattern to emerge from the chaos. I make work in collaboration with what’s around me, releasing control over outcomes and allowing the unconscious to lead the way. Throughout the process, I embody the mindset of an alien observer, stepping outside the human vantage point to occupy a timeless, scaleless, culture-less existence. I create things that are purposefully ambiguous, but simultaneously representational of the natural world. I’m particularly interested in the point at which objects and systems are labeled to be intelligent, conscious, or alive, and how these distinctions relate to the 21st century’s relationship to plants and technology. My work gives animistic qualities to a variety of forms exploring the crossroads at which intelligent systems may alternatively be defined as sentient creatures.
Website: unusmundusart.com
Monument Plinth
By Abbey Hepner
April 8 - May 7, 2022
On Display in our Curated Gallery
Abbey Hepner combines three investigative series to create Monument Plinth, her solo exhibit in ourCurated Gallery at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild. Hepner pulls from her series, Uravan, Monument Plinth, and Transuranic. Read more below about each series.
TRANSURANIC
uranotypes (uranium prints), 13” x 9”, 2014, framed at 16”x20”. Upon moving to New Mexico from Japan, where I participated in disaster relief work following the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown, I set out to understand the impact of the nuclear industry on my immediate surroundings. I photographed every site in the Western US that transports radioactive waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. Places like WIPP, seemingly transparent in their operations, as indicated by signage, still rest amongst us like scars on the landscape. Transuranic is a series of uranotypes, an obsolete nineteenth-century photographic process that uses uranium instead of silver to form the image; uranium is an element used to make nuclear bombs and is the basic fuel for nuclear power reactors. The series documents nuclear facilities from an outsider’s perspective. The red and yellow hue of the uranotypes is likened to the color of the sky after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and the material presence negates the unassuming and banal nature of these sites, reminding us of the reality ever-present in the images and in the places we inhabit.
Transuranic Project Map created by Dr. Scott White
MONUMENT PLINTH
laser-engraved archival pigment prints over black acrylic, 20” x 12,” 2020 Uranium disposal cells are geometric mounds engineered to isolate radioactive material from the surrounding environment. The mounds sit above the ground and cover surfaces from a few acres to half a mile and consist of an outer shell of riprap rock and a clay soil layer that covers the radioactive material. They are designed to allow for rain runoff and to prevent plant growth from forming on top and penetrating the clay layer. Typically, the cells in the Southwest are made from demolished buildings at uranium mines, and the cells in the Midwest and East are most commonly from uranium metal engineering and processing sites.
Some sites that produced the waste contained in the cells date back to the Manhattan Project and were created to mine and construct nuclear weapons; some of the sites continue to operate today for the nuclear energy industry. The amount of radioactivity in the cells varies, but most radiation comes from Uranium-238 with a half-life as old as the earth or 4.47 billion years. There are over 100 sites like these that exist in the US and the number is growing.
Disposal cells are architecturally fascinating sites. They are often designed to blend in with the landscape, but their shapes form mounds on the earth, and their suture materials seldom remain as invisible as intended. They are otherworldly to see up close, but even more fascinating to see from an aerial view where their odd geometry takes shape. While some sites are constructed away from populated cities, others such as those in Weldon Spring, just outside St. Louis, Missouri, are difficult to ignore and function as recreational destinations.
Monument Plinth features aerial images from forty uranium disposal cells across the US. The images were collected with the assistance of Dr. Mark Finco and acquired by the National Agriculture Imagery Program. I printed and mounted each image on black acrylic and laser engraved the cell detail into the surface, reflecting an internal space or void.
Uranium Disposal Cells and Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Sites Map created by Dr. Scott White
URAVAN
laser-engraved archival pigment prints over clear acrylic (backlit), 7.5”x 12,” 2020
In western Montrose county, the town of Uravan, Colorado, can still be located on a map, however it isn’t easy to find because it is buried under layers of clay, soil, and rock. Standard Chemical Company established the town of approximately 1,000 residents in 1912, naming it after uranium and vanadium, two minerals mined in the area. Activities at the local processing mill contaminated the soil and groundwater with radioactive chemicals so much so that by 1986 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) closed the town and relocated residents. Uravan was shredded, burned, and buried by the EPA, creating a 680-acre Superfund site.
For Uravan, I created three-dimensional, laser-engraved pigment prints by photographing the exact locations as those in historical images of buildings that existed before the town was destroyed. Formed by the laser burning into layers of paper at various depths, the historic structures appear against bleak and empty contemporary landscapes.
Abbey Hepner is an artist and educator based outside of St. Louis Missouri. Hepner holds an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of New Mexico and undergraduate degrees in Art and Psychology from the University of Utah. She previously taught at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Society for Photographic Education and teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville as an Assistant Professor of Art and Area Head of Photography.
Website: https://abbey-hepner.com/#/
Sustain
A portfolio exchange organized by Heather Leier
April 8 - May 7, 2022
On Display in our Ramp Gallery
Sustain, a printmaking portfolio exchange organized by Heather Leier will be on display in our Ramp Gallery. Each artist in the Sustain portfolio has created a print work that is inspired by one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Each artist was invited to imagine what a future would look like if their goal is achieved. They were asked to consider ways in which individuals can contribute to sustainable practices in meaningful ways. They were encouraged to consider how gender, race, class, religion, ability, geographic location, and socioeconomic status affects how one experiences and contributes to the challenges addressed through the SDGs in differing and complex ways. Artists were invited to consider how the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals will require both resistance and revolution.
La Imaginación: Una Colección de Fotografías de Julia López
January 21, 2021 - February 26, 2022
Photographer Julia López has a suite of photographers in our Ramp Gallery. Her work is focused and revolved around abstract, architectural photography with an integration of nature. Her artwork specifically seeks to bring viewers into the abstraction through color contrast, multiple exposures, and a painterly effect. Additionally, the use of the Saint Louis City as the foundational basis for this interpretation is particularly intriguing due to the amount of history and decomposition which surrounds us. The artwork seeks to speak to the living and the forgotten environments.
To see more of her work visit:
