This exhibition features four artists whose works contemplate places we frequent or inhabit as backdrops for forming identities and aspirations. Their works peek behind constructed facades of status or stability, find beauty in imperfection, and broaden prospects through shifts in perspective.

Recognizing the home as the foundational setting for forming identity, Jean Blackburn uses home furnishings as points-of-departure. She explores and exploits psychological associations by making new forms from familiar household objects. Blackburn dissects, manipulates, and reconfigures pieces of furniture into sculptures that allude to familial relationship dynamics. The inclination to create deeper meaning by fracturing and recombining domestic interiors crosses over into her two-dimensional work. Her digital prints begin as images from catalogs from stores like Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, and Williams and Sonoma, which are scanned and transferred onto paper. Onto imagery of staged, homogeneous rooms, Blackburn layers silkscreen and hand-painted marks that multiply, contort, and colorize the pictures beneath, challenging assumptions about the value of identifying with the status quo.

Lee Ann Scotto Adams' paintings of suburban houses read like observational studies of their occupants' idiosyncrasies, even in the notable absence of figurative depiction. Architectural structures are rendered off-kilter, and observed from unusual vantage points. She includes flawed or unsightly elements that many landscape painters might choose to omit. In "Chainlink", she centers her composition around a mismatched DIY fence repair that juxtaposes a chain-link panel with wooden pickets. What some may interpret as unsightly, she construes as whimsy. The wire mesh of the fence appears as a delicate lace. In many of her paintings, Scotto Adams' chooses to reflect transitional times of the day. Skies may be moody washes or looming dense gray atmospheres, but highlights of pink and gold along edges of the built environment challenge a perception of what would otherwise be dismal and unremarkable scenes, by coloring them with welcome bits of empathy, humor, and wonder. 

Kirstin Lamb's "Remix Embroidery Paintings" reference and replicate labor-intensive processes for creating textiles and decorative patterns from historical domestic interiors. To make these paintings, Lamb first generates a digitized grid of a compiled pattern and transfers it onto a wet media acetate. Over this printed image, she painstakingly paints in each gridded stitch with acrylic and acrylic gouache. The resulting compositions appear to be both woven and pixelated; modern and antiquated. In "Dandelion, Rhododendron, and Cross Stitch Boogie Remix",  Lamb incorporates a selection of cross-stitch patterns with images of a common suburban-landscaping shrub (rhododendron) and a maligned lawn-disrupting "weed" (dandelion), and then further disrupts the scene with overlays and underlays of digital paint scribbles. While she is revealing the guidelines beneath the images of floral bouquets and motifs, she is also alluding to and defying the rigid structures that dictate expectations for gender and class conformity, and hierarchies within the Art world.

Ernest Jolicoeur's compositions combine deconstructed observational studies with reconstructed fragments of retrieved memories. For his ongoing series, "Erased Landscapes" he references architectural structures, natural landscapes, and the spaces within and between. These multi-layered collage compositions are tightly confined within the parameters of the standard size of nine and a half by twelve inches, yet they convey expansive space. Jolicoeur literally and metaphorically stitches together disparate scales, materials and vanishing points to draw viewers through and around his vibrant, abstract compositions. These hybrid versions of remembered places invite viewers to shift their own perspective and to reimagine the spaces they most frequently inhabit

—Alicia Renadette, Exhibition Curator