Nostalgia is a double-edged sword. The links from past to present and the line between valuable and disposable is more blurred than ever in a world of mass production and planned obsolescence. Fall 2024 Artists-in-Residence Claire Kiester, Andrew Leventis, and Cathy McClure are artists continuously reappraising our everyday cultural objects of both now and then, while repackaging them for reflection on what we truly value.
Claire Kiester is a fiber artist, printmaker, and installation artist whose work investigates the systems within our society and the residue they leave behind. Kiester’s fiber and crochet techniques utilize unexpected recycled and eco-friendly materials to activate and transform space. The traditional and the modern co-exist in these explorations of pattern and repetition, visual tools within a performative process of making.
Painter Andrew Leventis makes meticulously detailed oil paintings of contemporary vanitas, a motif popularized in early still life in which food, flowers, and other perishable objects represent the fleeting nature of life and the passing of time. Leventis’s images are strikingly familiar. They speak of domesticity, a quiet intimacy that is part of our everyday lives while illuminating our futile desire for hedonistic consumption in contemporary society.
Cathy McClure uses an anti-disciplinary approach, upending expectations through reverse-engineering and experimentation. McClure’s work tells a story about our societal penchant for instant gratification, over-production, and chronic excessive consumption. Often using toys as metaphors, this work draws upon a collective nostalgia for a past we have enthusiastically discarded and raises questions about what is considered valuable.
The showcase will be on view from September 20 to December 14. Visit anytime during gallery hours to meet the artists and explore their works.
