October 2024
Sarah Reagan, Ana Maria Farina and Hanna Washburn, and Melissa Dorn, October 5 – October 27, 2024. The opening reception are Friday, October 4 (“First Friday”), 6 to 8 p.m
Sarah Reagan
The Kids are Talking
Crafted from wood and accented with digital and bioplastic components, The Kids are Talking asserts that contemporary identity, experimentation, and gender deviation are as valuable—’as classic’—as the masterpieces we idolize.
This body of work reimagines three iconic images: The Creation of Adam, The Birth of Venus, and David, by evoking the wondrous anarchy of childhood. Using a combination of traditional craft methodologies with modern technology, Reagan challenges the hierarchy of materials and methods. This fusion allows for a dialogue between the past and the present, the rigid and the flexible, the serious and the silly, ultimately questioning what and who is considered ‘worth listening to’ in art and society.
Artist Statement
Sarah Reagan is a sculptor who imbues industrial construction materials with qualities that evoke a more childlike perspective on the world. Her work examines the queer body at work and embraces masculinity and manual labor as a large-scale “plaything” within a world that often punishes gender deviance. Utilizing traditional woodworking techniques alongside digital fabrication, Reagan offers a whimsical response to the harshness of gender binaries imposed from an early age, emphasizing our ability to establish our own rules in defiance of the status quo.
About the Artist
Sarah Reagan (b. 1995; Minneapolis, MN) is a sculptor who transforms industrial materials into playful, childlike forms. After serving in the Peace Corps, she earned her MFA in Craft and Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. Reagan has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Virginia Commonwealth University, Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts, and Penland School of Craft, and held residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Flower Shop Art Studio, and The Wassaic Project. She has exhibited both domestically and internationally, including at Corrente de Ar (Lisbon, Portugal), Messler Gallery (Rockport, ME), Appalachian Center for Craft (Cookeville, TN), and the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art (Brownsville, TX.)
Ana Maria Farina and Hanna Washburn
The Animal Within the Animal
Ana Maria Farina and Hanna Washburn present The Animal Within the Animal, a vibrant visual conversation that shares the many ways their practices intertwine. Both artists are mothers who use materials associated with the home and femininity to communicate the power and expansiveness of the body. Their distinct visual styles meld to create a collaborative tale, narrating complex corporeal joys and burdens. The works fuse imagery of the body with creatures, highlighting the mammal inside each of us. Plush, comforting textures and familiar domestic patterns come together to create hybrid forms, simultaneously maternal, familiar, and uncanny.
Play is key to this collaboration—exploration and humor exist alongside the weightiness of the subject matter. Everything in the exhibition is in the process of growing and changing: lengthening forms and limbs, reaching out toward a shared understanding. In The Animal Within the Animal, Farina and Washburn create new bodies that are free to be concurrently nurturing, seductive, strange, and distinctly autonomous.
Artist Statements
Ana Maria Farina conjures objects of comfort that live in between the realms of sculpture, painting and tapestry. She paints with a gun––a tufting gun––along with needles, hooks, and knots, and sculpts surfaces into mounds and woven bodies that flirt with the idea of inner/outer landscapes. Farina is interested in the unconscious mind: what lives under the surface, and the creature-like, mythological parts of being human.
Hanna Washburn constructs sculptures from repurposed textiles, furniture, and household items. Sewing by hand and working intuitively, Washburn allows her forms to evolve into complex aggregates of color, pattern, and texture, visualizing the patchwork of identity-forming and the complex joy of existing inside a body. With a background in traditional sewing, Washburn honors and experiments with her inherited process, employing and complicating textile techniques like quilting, embroidery, and upholstery. Her sculptures assert their autonomy as they transcend the utility of their materials, growing and changing and extending into space.
About the Artist
Ana Maria Farina is a Brazilian artist now based in the Hudson Valley, New York. Farina’s work has been featured on New American Paintings, Hyperallergic, Highlands Current, I Like Your Work Podcast, Visionary Art Collective, and in venues around the world such as the SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, Future Fair, the Wassaic Project, the Garrison Art Center, the Dorsky Museum, Paradice Palase, Abigail Ogilvy, Susan Eley Fine Art, Woman Made Gallery, Woodstock Museum, Subject Matter Art Gallery (London, UK), and Casa de Criadores (SP, Brazil). Farina attended Columbia University and SUNY New Paltz for her graduate studies and she is the 2021 recipient of the College Art Association Fellowship in Visual Arts.
Hanna Washburn is an artist and curator based in Beacon, NY. Her work has garnered attention from publications such as The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Cult Bytes, and the Femme Art Review. Washburn’s pieces have been exhibited at venues including SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, the Dorsky Museum of Art, NADA Art Fair, and the Wassaic Project. She has held artist residencies at institutions including Haystack Mountain School, Vermont Studio Center, and Monson Arts. Washburn earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2018 and her BA from Kenyon College in 2014.
Melissa Dorn
Fem-utility Closet
Fem-utility Closet offers you the time and space to fully feel, engage, and contemplate the world you’ve entered, potentially evoking a sense of wonder and delight. As you get closer to the objects and materials, you may begin to think about the everydayness of what is around you and the labor, most often unseen, that goes into our everyday existence.
Melissa Dorn is particularly interested in how mops, feminism, craft, and labor intertwine. Her obsession with industrial mops spurred a love of repeating textures, lines, and historically gendered craft processes. She started with the personal: painting self-portraits focusing on the “moppiness” of her hair.
Now, Dorn wants to create space for maintenance. She defines maintenance as caring for oneself and one’s community, a necessity, not a frill. In her exhibition Fem-utility Closet, she invites you to rest on the ottowomen and take in the humor and absurdity of your surroundings.
Artist Statement
I make work about feminism and labor using the mop, an everyday object, as a point of departure. To be blunt, I’ve had an ongoing obsession with mops, feminism, and labor. I start with the personal: making self-portraits, repeating textures and lines over and over to self-soothe, and embracing the repetitive nature of craft that keeps my hands busy, allowing my mind to wander. Through this, I process the continual stream of input from the world that challenges me to make change.
With the introduction of fiber, aka mop, the work has begun to lean heavily on craft and how craft can be used as a form of maintenance. I want to create space for maintenance.
I expand the work to offer my community “maintenance moments” while they get lost in the repetitions and textures I create, and come together to share through making and conversation.
About the Artist
Melissa Dorn (Anchorage, Alaska, 1967) is a Milwaukee artist whose work utilizes craft, pulling at threads of her history, midwesterness, and the everyday. Her recent exhibitions include Fem-utility Closet, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts; Sarah Ball Allis Art Museum, Charles Allis Art Museum; Soft Power, Minneapolis College of Art and Design Concourse Gallery; 3 Faces of Eve, 5 Points Gallery; Made in Paint, The Sam & Adele Golden Gallery; Tension in the Ordinary, James May Gallery; Mobile Home, Var Gallery; Infauxstructure, Sage College Opalka Gallery; The Book Club: What Would We Do With Lynne Tillman, Frank Juarez Gallery; and The Jump Off, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. Select collections include: Saint Kate - The Arts Hotel; Northwestern Mutual; Mandel Group; UW Hospital and Clinics; Milwaukee Area Technical College. Dorn earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.
Image Credits
Sarah Reagan, Mr. Angry Eyes, 2024, Douglas Fir, 9 x 9 x 16 in; Ana Maria Farina and Hanna Washburn, Hold Onto Your Treasures, 2024, Recycled textiles and fibers, thread, batting, wood, snap hook, plastic, 18 x 20 x 4 in; Melissa Dorn, High Maintenance, Mop, foam, 1000 t-pins, wood stool. 40 x 14 x 14 in.