Rachel Debuque, Diane Meyer, Lori Larusso

Exhibit dates: June 26 – August 15, 2015

Join us Friday, June 26, 2015 for the opening of our summer group show. Enjoy beer from Holy City Brewing, Wine Awesomeness, and AutoBahn food truck will be on site! 6:30 – 8:30 pm

Artist Talk + Opening Reception 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Concert 9 – 11 pm
Human Resources with special guest HEYROCCO!

About Rachel Debuque 

Rachel Debuque (b. 1983, Allentown, Pennsylvania) received her MFA degree at The University of Georgia. She received her BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is currently an Assistant Professor and Foundations Coordinator of the Studio Foundations program at George Mason University.
She has exhibited extensively including, New York, Croatia, and Philadelphia. She was recently awarded to attend the internationally recognized Bemis Center for Contemporary Art’s residency program.

Her research spans installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Debuque defamiliarizes space and objects using common decorating design strategies such as pattern, paint, and the arrangement of objects. Her work purposefully plays with two and three-dimensional realms, creating a push/pull in perceptions. Her use of vibrant colors to create directional line patterns that suggest dimensional space. Conversely, cast objects are flattened with matte paints. These formal decisions twist notions of domestic space. New meaning emerges from a complex relationship between objects, background, foreground, and space. This creates an atmosphere is both nostalgic and unfamiliar at the same time.

Many of these decisions are created through a rigorous studio practice that involves many experiments with color, space, and form. She collects objects that transition through many stages, such as becoming cast replicas or layering with coats of paint. Objects and space become the canvas for world making.

About Diane Meyer

I am interested in the failures of photography in preserving experience and personal history as well as the means by which photographs transform history into nostalgic objects that obscure understandings of the past.

In the series Time Spent That Might Otherwise Be Forgotten, I am interested in the disjunct between experience and photographic representation. As the embroidery takes on the appearance of digital pixelization, I am trying to make a connection between memory and forgetting with digital file corruption. The tactile, hand-embroidered overlay not only relates to the visual language of digital imaging, but also references the growing trend of photos remaining primarily digital—stored on cell phones and hard drives, but rarely printed out into a tangible object.

Lori Larusso

My current work explores the unavoidable contradictions that exist in our personal (and collective) systems of belief, by pointing to the complexity of our individual situations and the structures that trap us when we try to alter those beliefs. While based in the experience of daily interaction with our immediate surroundings, these pieces examine looming traditional and cultural expectations that resist forces of change while also promising something better.

My interest in representations of domestic spaces lies in the comfort that is implied, and the how this notion of comfort reduces the complexity that is present in the way these material forms were produced and came to occupy the domestic space. The domestic sphere is a private place, but we are constantly seeing curated snapshots of domestic life via facebook, instagram, blogs, etc. This is no different than the 1950s depictions of women happily slaving away at domestic chores. These new blogs have replaced the old Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, and Woman’s Day magazines. Our “retro” pasts have become some women’s current reality. Our home lives are never that simple or neat, they cannot be summed up in an image of a freshly baked pie, images of toddlers in knitted sweaters and homemade haircuts, or even in a picture of a pile of dirty laundry and the mess that the new puppy made. These images only begin to present a version of what is really going on inside the home.

In the shaped (non-rectangular) pieces, the edges of the painted images are defined by the edges of the actual supports. Several works contain multiple separate pieces that interact within a whole idea. By including only the necessary information needed to complete the idea and composition, aspects of a specific situation or environment are isolated and brought to the forefront.

Regardless of our individual upbringings in the US, media and historical representations of generic and stereotypical middle-America remind us of the culture we prefer to present as reality. For this work, I utilize both acquired and invented imagery. No image is without reference. These works question, in part, the everyday search for meaning and fulfillment. Representations of generic middle-America allude to the common feeling of disconnect, as well as the struggle for validation and happiness in daily life.

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