Featuring work by Jamond Williams, Michelle Fromme, Shannon Anderson, Robert Hubert, Maggie Chen, Elmeater Morton, Ricky Bearghost, Tess Bidelspach, Lawren Oliver, and Lindsay Scheu

“As I was saying loving repeating being is in a way earthly being. In some it is repeating that gives to them always a solid feeling of being. In some children there is more feeling and in repeating eating and playing, in some in story-telling and their feeling. More and more in living as growing young men and women and grown men and women and men and women in their middle living, more and more there comes to be in them differences in loving repeating in different kinds of men and women, there comes to be in some more and in some less loving repeating. Loving repeating in some is a going on always in them of earthly being, in some it is the way to completed understanding. Loving repeating then in some is their natural way of complete being. This is now some description of one.”

-Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

If you were to ask us what Stein means we might give you a preliminary list: morning coffee, makeup tutorials, the Macarena, karaoke parties, cover songs, Christmas cards, selfies, mugshots, peace signs, handshakes, heartbeats, white picket fences, nursery rhymes, dollhouse furniture, bottle cap collections, counting sheep, prayer candles, chore wheels, cartwheels, kickflips, a composition book filled cover to cover with the name of a crush, a Wikipedia page titled “List of people who have gone over Niagara Falls”, bathroom graffiti, Tik Tok dances, Minions, alarm clocks, nail biting, teeth grinding, synchronized swimming, work, talking about work, the song “Work” by Rihanna, the way everyone’s bodies start moving when “Work” by Rihanna comes on, to-do lists, top 10 lists, new year’s resolutions, farewell kisses, bringing pictures to the barber, sons, fathers, and all the things you know but do not remember learning. 

If you asked us again we could tell you about some of our favorite artists.  We could tell you that Shannon Anderson uses carbon paper to turn images from family sitcoms, supernatural melodramas, basic cable fantasies, and her own family photos into phantasmagoric impressions of love’s generic shapes.  We could describe the junkyard realism of Lawren Oliver, who uses common materials and processes of their own invention to construct DIY facsimiles of everyday objects.  We’d rave about Robert Hubert’s devotionals to shag carpet Americana and classic rock, Jamond Williams’ crooked windows and hieroglyphic revelries, and the vision board wishwork of Maggie Chen’s dream houses.  We could explain that Lindsay Scheu’s early works reflect long periods of meticulous devotion to a single color, and make the case that her recent work, which finds her perpetually duplicating single images and phrases, is both an extension and inversion of her original project.  We might then warn you that Chanel Conklin returns again and again to sites of disturbance–grindhouse violence, hideous and powerful men, women in peril–and irritates them like fingernails against a rash.  We’d tell you that Michelle Fromme crowds her drawings with the handwritten echoes of her encounters with language, that Ricky Bearghost applies a weaver’s logic to words and colors in his works on paper, and about the difficulty in parsing where the lines of Elmeater Morton’s splintered, recursive transcriptions end and those of her drawings begin.  We could describe for you, finally, the hypnotizing orbit of Tess Bidelspach’s hand as she disappears her figures behind cyclones of Crayola marker.

We could tell you all of that and if you repeated the question we would tell you that we put together this exhibition so that we might have some description of one.