Exhibition Archive

10/1/25 10/1/25

Aesthetics of Power

Aesthetics of Power
Curator: Mahwish Chish
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3, 2025, 5-8pm

As tools of harm grow more remote, outsourced, and hidden, their impacts continue to rapidly shape our lives. While the mechanisms may be out of sight, their impact remains immediate, shaping the human experience, memories, and the cultural archive. This exhibition highlights work that responds to this contradiction: a world where power hides in plain sight, but leaves its unmistakable marks.

Aesthetics of Power, an exhibition juried by artist Mahwish Chishty. This show looks closely at how aesthetics can be used to express layered, quietly disruptive ideas. We are drawn to work that surprises, that reveals itself slowly, and that occupies the fragile space where beauty unsettles rather than soothes.

Artists in this exhibition reflect on how aesthetic interpretations carry the weight of history, how beauty might obscure or reveal power, and how what is finely wrought can also bear witness.

10/1/25 10/1/25

Elyse Martin

Elyse Martin: Moving On
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3, 2025, 5-8pm

“Moving On” is a compilation of abstract paintings influenced by the experience of the pandemic, from the days before its onset, to the lasting effects on present day.
Eleven bright and complex canvases invite the viewer to connect with the struggle between always changing complexities and mobile, but always present, soothing space.
Special thanks to Sarah Krepp for her skillful curation.

9/1/25 9/1/25

Diane Jurado

Diane Jurado: The Ambiguous Narrative

Opening Reception: Friday, September 5, 2025, 5-8pm

My painting is a process of discovery. It becomes a metaphorical construct of personal experience and memory. Abstract shapes emerge, evoking a sense of movement and interaction; creating an implied narrative that is both ambiguous and surprising.

8/30/25 8/30/25

Lee Stanton

Lee Stanton: Lost Words

Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 2025, 5-8pm

This series is a response to the subtle erasure of the natural world from our shared language. The removal of words like "acorn,” "dandelion," and “raven" from children's dictionaries is more than a linguistic update; it is a symptom of a growing disconnect from the environment. These once-common words, replaced by tech words like "broadband" and "bullet-point", represent a wealth of lived experience and ecological knowledge that is being forgotten.

Language has the power to both define and connect us to our surroundings. This series urges us to pause, look, and remember the words that anchor us to the living world. The work aims to reclaim and celebrate these words and to encourage a deeper appreciation for the environment and a more mindful engagement with the world around us.

8/30/25 8/30/25

Hannah Fitzgerald

Hannah Fitzgerald: Not Everything We’ve Inherited is Worthy

Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 2025, 5-8pm

Not Everything We’ve Inherited is Worthy examines the complexities of parent-child relationships, with a focus on motherhood. Drawing inspiration from the enduring expectations placed on children, often regardless of their own feelings, the pieces confront the realities of failed motherhood and abuse that leave lasting emotional wounds. By incorporating deliberate motifs such as pantyhose, cowry shells, and hair, the work juxtaposes traditional sculptural materials with objects that symbolize femininity, reflecting the artist’s contextualization of motherhood. These materials and forms explore the intertwined dynamics of love, manipulation, and envy. Revealing the emotional layers that shape these relationships. Conceptual installations are grounded in a nude color palette, emphasizing the body and the physicality of parent-child connections. Through this lens, the work provokes reflection on power dynamics, the struggle for self-assertion, and the enduring impact of emotional harm within intimate familial relationships.

8/30/25 8/30/25

Sophia Brueckner

Sophia Brueckner: Hearts and Flowers: Hunting for Love

Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 2025, 5-8pm

“Frankly, I make clothes for women to look sweet. I like sweet women. I see women’s role in life in the light of sweetness. Men should be the hunters. Women are the keepers of the hunters: it’s a straightforward, set philosophy of mine.” - Laura Ashley

“Disruptive camouflage” is a type of camouflage that uses patterns and color to hinder detection or recognition of an object's boundaries and/or other conspicuous features of its body. It involves the manipulation of the perceptual processing of its viewers. Laura Ashley was a Welsh designer known for her romantic floral prints and feminine designs with a bucolic feel. Like modern tradwife influencers, she promoted the idea of women as submissive wives and mothers to contradictorily become a breadwinner. Hunting camouflage is meant to render a person invisible while hunting, but wearing it has become a fashion statement in rural areas to show off one’s masculinity and dominance over nature. Sophia Brueckner designs new camo patterns that integrate Laura Ashley florals with Realtree hunting camo and use them to make gender stereotyped artifacts and clothing to subvert false binaries about gender, class, domesticity, and nature.

8/1/25 8/1/25

Rivers Qinnan Zhu

Rivers Qinnan Zhu: Thread’s Return along the Equinox

Opening Reception: Friday, August 1, 2025, 5-8pm

I come from a lineage of four generations of female artisans, with a strong tradition of lace-making in Xiaoshan, China. Lace, with its intricate yet fragile structure, carries a tension between visibility and absence, labor and ornamentation, history and transformation. Lace-making is not just about preserving techniques; it’s about understanding them as shifting, unstable, and deeply connected to the people who practice them.

Thread’s Return along the Equinox asks how traditions continue— by preserving sameness or through adaptation? Lace becomes a way of holding time, of returning through making.

8/1/25 8/1/25

Jessica Swank

Jessica Swank: Muscle Memory

Opening Reception: Friday, August 1, 2025, 5-8pm

Muscle Memory is a meditation on the significance of labor and the body in a time increasingly shaped by automation and post-biological ideals. This series represents an extension of my own body detached from myself, exploring how the body may become detached from consciousness in the digital age.. Through repetitive processes and actions, I think of my labor in creating this work as itself an act of resistance against the idea that human beings can be reduced to machines. While the work is not directly performative, I consider the labor embedded in the making of these works as a quiet performance.

8/1/25 8/1/25

Jasmine Elizabeth

Jasmine Elizabeth: Love, Lies, and Everything Else We’ve Ever Done Wrong

Opening Reception: Friday, August 1, 2025, 5-8pm

It can be compelling to think we understand something, to assert that we understand what a story is, and have that be what defines us. Art should never be clear. It should never have an easy conclusion.

Love, Lies, and Everything Else We’ve Ever Done Wrong implores the viewer to look closer than is comfortable. Subjects reduced to their most basic forms narrate the quiet moments: moments of contemplation, otherness, and selfhood. In this series of paintings, the amount of visual information stripped away in each painting varies, allowing the viewer to bring in their own conclusions about what they are seeing.

8/1/25 8/1/25

Charlie Goss

Charlie Goss: Inner Beauty, Outer Expression

Opening Reception: Friday, September 5, 2025, 5-8pm

This collection of figurative oil paintings delves into the complexities of the human form, challenging conventional beauty standards and celebrating the power of inner strength. By employing bold colors, expressive gestures, and the evocative power of the face, these works invite viewers to engage in a profound and personal dialogue with the subjects depicted.

Ultimately, this collection seeks to inspire viewers to appreciate beauty in all its forms, to challenge societal norms, and to embrace unique identities. These paintings aim to leave a lasting impression, empowering viewers to see themselves and others in a new light.

7/1/25 7/1/25

Lisa Walcott

Lisa Walcott:

Opening Reception: Friday, July 11, 2025, 5-8pm

For Dear Life grapples with and makes light of the perils of daily life. Inspiration is derived from domestic spaces—a space that can be hauntingly dull as well as safe and protective. I look for comparisons and rely on the uncanny, such as a flushed baby swing mechanism moving a broom to sweep the floor, referencing the monotony and ingenuity of motherhood.

7/1/25 7/1/25

Monica J. Brown

Monica J. Brown: The Biomythography of Jaybird & The Queen of Hearts

Opening Reception: Friday, July 11, 2025, 5-8pm

“Biomythography” is a term coined by Audre Lord defined as “combining elements of history, biography and myth” within literature. My exploration of this idea is a continuation of the ongoing series of paintings, collages and poetry in my Mythical Memory series. This body of work combines Afro-surrealism, abstraction, and elements of pop art aesthetics. This overlap and intersection of genres is used to create a dialogue around the abstract qualities of time and memory, the liminality of the dream space and the way in which personal narratives can create a mythology. Time and memory are components of history. The mythology enters as the realm where the dream space and memory coincide. Love is the enduring force that weaves it all together.

7/1/25 7/1/25

Margaret Archambault

Margaret Archambault: Affect the Effect

Opening Reception: Friday, July 11, 2025, 5-8pm

Artist Talk: TBD

“Affect the Effect” is a series of paintings that act as a direct reflection of my experiences and my desire to share the truth about the power we possess to overcome doubt and express ourselves in ways that are both unique and universal at the same time. We are the creator and we truly can “Affect the Effect” in and of our lives and sculpt them into that which we desire.

5/1/25 5/1/25

Pat Stephens

Pat Stephens: Earthy Stories

Opening Reception: Friday, May 2, 2025, 5-8pm

I am interested in how information is realized, interpreted, and shared. My work is inspired by my surroundings and observations of transitory states in the environment. Viewers should think they are looking at a familiar object when in fact they are not; I love the reversal of expectations. These ceramics serve no utilitarian purpose other than to express the world around me. The inspiration for my pieces comes from the eight-block daily dog walk, which includes shadows reflecting off street signs, thrown away to-go containers littering the street, discarded boxes run over by cars, and telephone poles having graffiti, pipes, and wires attached to them.

5/1/25 5/1/25

Raissa Bailey

Raissa Bailey: Venus Rising, Axiom Schema

Opening Reception: Friday, May 2, 2025, 5-8pm

Artist Talk: Saturday, May 3, 1:00pm

Raissa Bailey’s upcoming solo show, “Venus Rising, Axiom Schema,” delves into the concepts of consciousness and evolution. This innovative showcase blends installation and mixed media art, inviting viewers to explore connections between prehistoric and modern modes of creation.

3/1/25 3/1/25

Nicole Havekost

Nicole Havekost: Proliferate

Opening Reception: Friday, March 7, 2025, 5-8pm

Proliferate, by artist Nicole Havekost, is of a series of ten works on paper. Made with traditional drawing materials, the artist pokes holes through the paper, creating a white, swollen perforation on the front. Using ovoid forms, the artist references voids and tears, and interiors and exteriors through accumulated gestures. The work speaks to unseen labor, the passage of time, and transformation.

3/1/25 3/1/25

David Najib Kasir

David Najib Kasir:Math of Four Minute Warnings

Opening Reception: Friday, March 7, 2025, 5-8pm

Math of Four Minute Warnings is an exhibition that interrogates the role Western media plays in constructing cultural narratives, while centering a caring and concerning lens on the destruction of Syria and its people through large-scale paintings. For Kasir, the works start from a personal place. “Iraq is my father’s country, and Syria is my mother’s as well as the second home of my youth. It is where my aunts, uncles and cousins were living. It is where there are buildings where I slept in and streets where I played tag and other games as a child. I’ve witnessed years of destruction of my countries from US invasion, with very little regard from Western mainstream media to civilian casualties.”

Exhibition Archive

Aesthetics of Power

Elyse Martin

Diane Jurado

Lee Stanton

Hannah Fitzgerald

Sophia Brueckner

Rivers Qinnan Zhu

Jessica Swank

Jasmine Elizabeth

Charlie Goss

Lisa Walcott

Monica J. Brown

Margaret Archambault

Pat Stephens

Raissa Bailey

Nicole Havekost

David Najib Kasir

Hours

ARC Gallery