Featuring artwork by:
Ashley Hope
Elizabeth Insogna
Anne Polashenski
Greg Thielker
Curated by Katerina Lanfranco
Liminal Worlds features the work of four artists who examine the thin and tenuous line dividing the many realities that we experience as part of the human condition. Anne Polashenski and Greg Thielker consider notions of self and other through ethnography, immigrant experiences, and national borders. Ashley Hope and Elizabeth Insogna delve into the interconnectedness and elusiveness of the spirit realms and afterlife. Collectively these artists become guides for us to venture through their artworks into territories that are filled with contemplation, politics, and deeper capacity for self-awareness.
Ashley Hope uses laser-etched CCTV images burned into maple wood to capture and immortalize the last traces of missing human figures. The reductive process of burning the wood away reinforces the theme of presence and absence, ultimately creating a tangible marker of loss. Her decorative hand additions to the sometimes glitched camera images draw from the early Christian/Byzantine artistic tradition of using geometric patterns to represent an unknowable higher power, and materials like gold leaf to indicate a spiritual or otherworldly presence.
Elizabeth Insogna works through iconography of Goddess reverence and ideas of the Divine Feminine to highlight a Queer perspective in the dialogue of female power. Her work straddles the world of ancient spirituality and contemporary body politics. Insogna’s devotional ceramic cauldrons reference scrying – an ancient form of divination, are paired with colorful abstract and symbolic figurative paintings to evoke a history of ritual practice.
Anne Polashenski mines her family’s Polish immigrant history to uncover an autobiographical connection that comprises both feelings of American identity and otherness. Through a range of media including gouache and C-printing, her artwork collages traditional patterns – a sort of camouflage – with domestic, grotesque, and alien imagery with an emphasis on blending in and survival. In these works, Polashenski attempts to understand and recreate historical connections that were not present in her childhood as her grandparents strove towards American assimilation.
Gregory Thielker’s work is shaped by the arbitrary nature of territory and memory. In these paintings from his series Unmeasured, his hyper-realistic transcription of physical sites centers on the border between Mexico and the US, offering a critical and contemplative glance at border politics. His use of actual dirt from the sites he visits as paint pigment enforces the solidity and permanence of these places and connection to the images he makes. The nation state border is defined by a wall built in various parts, protruding like a sculptural artifact from the landscape, and that continues to be an object of political division.
Opening Reception Friday, April 27 7-9p
On view through June 6, 2018
Panel discussion 7pm May 8th, 2018
Gallery Hours: MWF 1:30-6:30p
Additional Weekend Gallery hours:
May 19-20: 1:30-6:30pm
June 2nd: 1:30-6:30pm
http://www.trestlegallery.org/
Image: Anne Polashenski, Polish Bird, 2016, C-prints, gouache & collage on paper, 30 x 22″