Show ran from 8/1/2012 to 8/18/2012

SEND ME YOUR LAST CIGARETTE  mixed media

Opening Reception: Friday, July 27, 6-9pm

Jackie Hoysted is an Irish native and Maryland resident who is exploring the psychology of smoking and quitting through her art project Send Me Your Last Cigarette. Hoysted’s mixed media work revolves around the opposing notions of destruction/healing and death/resurrection. After destroying paper with a lighter (a metaphor for herself as smoker), she encases the paper in wax, as if to mummify it. She also creates funerary temples for others embarking on the same journey – creating art out of their last cigarettes and honoring their new path to freedom from nicotine addiction.

Show ran from 8/1/2012 to 8/18/2012

THE NURSE’S HOUSE    photography

Opening Reception: Friday, July 27, 6-9pm

Michelle Cox sees the the Midwest changing before her eyes. The shift from abandoned industry to technology suggests hidden beauty. Cox sees these areas for their details and seeks to draw attention to the seemingly insignificant items. This photographic array, The Nurse’s House, presents their stories through her photography once more before the locations and objects are gone.

Show ran from 8/1/2012 to 8/18/2012

WISH YOU WERE HERE    drawings

Opening Reception: Friday, July 27, 6-9pm

Experiences of travel were once shared through the artifact of the postcard. They described the smells, colors and shapes of a landscape that were left to the imagination of the receiver. The magic of hand written letters has been lost to travel blogs, skyping, emails and text messages.

Wish You Were Here pays homage to the hand written postcard. Claire Putney’s large-scale drawings are based upon the written correspondence of loved ones through postcards and personal letters.

Putney’s work explores the relationship between human experience and topographical landscapes. Together, they form an intriguing geography that gives evidence to one’s physical and emotional relationship with a place and the histories that are created there.

Show ran from 8/1/2012 to 8/18/2012

CAP THE VIOLENCE; PILE ON THE SEXY      mixed media

Opening Reception: Friday, July 27, 6-9pm

“Once upon a time there were three little girls who went to the police academy….but I took them away from all that…my name is Charlie.”

1970s television shows like Charlie’s Angels, Policewoman and Get Christie Love presented a stereotypical sexy female crime fighter. Thirty years later “jiggle TV” still lives but there is a wide gap between the sexy myth of female crime fighters and criminals and the more complex reality.

In her new exhibit of watercolors and hand-sewn hair drawings, Cap the Violence; Pile on the Sexy, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas reflects with humor and sensitivity on violence, the sexy and femininity. “The sight of women with ostensibly deadly weapons challenges our preconceptions about the female or maternal role. Is violence the province of the masculine, not the feminine?”