Matthew Doll

acrylic on panel

44 x 50 in.

2019

This painting recasts a medieval fresco and story of a Jewish boy who receives the Eucharist and is thrown into the furnace by his father only to be found by his mother unharmed and embraced. I would love to imagine that the original artist understood that the family embracing their child was the point and not the utility of the miracle. I wanted to make the embrace of the family the center of the story, a refuge amidst the recurring persecutions throughout history. And whereas the church should be a refuge, and the table a place of communion, we know that this has not always been the case.

Matthew Doll

acrylic on panel

40 x 27.5 in.

2019

Midbar is the Hebrew word for wilderness—the place of great silence and transformation. Midbar also contains the meaning of the verb “to speak.” The midbar is the place of exodus, temptation, and revelation; it is where the Torah was given. In the wilderness there is always risk. But within that risk, there is meaning.

Lanecia Rouse

acrylic, paper, found photography, string, brick

22.5 x 12.5 in.

2021

“Come celebrate/ with me that everyday/ something has tried to kill me/ and has failed.” In the company of Lucille Clifton’s poetry, I spent a year exploring notions of resilience and the myriad ways humans choose to lean into life—on a bridge between those everyday realities that have the power to destroy us and the somethings that beckon us to keep going.

Lanecia Rouse

mother’s dress, baby’s breath, daughter’s birth and funeral dress, grandma’s house gown, house siding, family photo and frame

84 x 48 x 6 in.

2022

Becoming the sacred ground from which other work emerged, this installation marked the beginning of my journey through “mothers’ gardens” and the tender archaeology of re-memory. It bears witness to the matriarchal lineage that flows through my veins, including the women before me and the little girl I lost too soon.

Anna Yearwood

Fabriano Rosapina paper, water-based ink, copper plate, dry-point etching.

Partial view of series originally displayed in cycle: prints 1‒7 followed by 7‒1

14 prints 6 x 8.5 in.

2017

This work began as an initial act of engaging memories of home by carving an image into a copper plate, followed by a repeated retracing of the plate lines, reflecting an internal digging further into the memory. At various points in the material process, I printed an edition, each proof of the plate a stage of remembering. The more I built up the layers of the image, both on the plate and in my mind, the less clear it was, the darker the image of home became, and the more physically challenging it was to carve the plate. The wrestling with memories was simultaneously more labored. Experimenting with the order created different emotions. Laying them finally out as a cycle, prints 1‒7 followed by 7‒1, the effect of moving from one direction and then back again, felt truer to my emotional engagement with the process. As I made the work, I realized I didn’t want to destroy the image of home, but to come to an understanding.

Mary Hallam Pearse

lead, steel

60 x 36 x 36 in.

2023

Full Bloom examines how the material lead and the symbolic nature of flowers express the paradoxical link between the world brought to us by our senses, our desires, and death. The accumulation of matter plays a role in shaping the work while simultaneously conveying the emptiness of over-consumption and merging themes of mortality and the human condition.

Joseph Peragine

acrylic on canvas

42 x 48 in.

2023

In an ongoing series called After the Hunt, dreamy abstract landscapes hide animals in boggy labyrinths among banks of flowers. Themes of life and death hover over the waters, an element vital to all life, but also sometimes obscuring our awareness of our inherent interconnectedness with nature.

Harry Ally

mixed media on canvas

60x42

2023

The creative act connects me to the past, to a timeless tradition in art that has always been a primary concern for humanity: the expression of exis­tence. When I begin the process of making art I am always asking: Is there someone there or is there no one?

Antonio Darden

MDF, plywood, car cover

61 x 185 x 65 in.

2023

S Tenebris exists in the lineage of grief. It is a re-creation of my father’s southern style race truck he left me, a 1984 Chevrolet S-10 (with a 383 Stroker, if you are asking). This relic I now store under a chalky covering in my studio with no anticipation of an unveiling, a spirit in suspension.