Through disparate approaches, Elizabeth Alexander, Mara Trachtenberg, and Kailey Coppens explore domestic interiors as richly layered visual and psychological terrains  where identities, values, and memories are formed.

About “Death Over Life”

Elizabeth Alexander will be presenting a selection of installation-based sculptures and photographs from her 2022 exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art, which featured a wallpaper motif with a gradient of hand-painted flowers in bloom and in decay. Throughout the creation of many of her works, Alexander uses processes of removal, accumulation and reconfiguration of floral motifs in wallpaper and porcelain dishes. She casts functional, decorative, and natural materials in hand-made paper - grafting them together to create new meaning from familiar surroundings.

“From the Book of Time”, a poem by Mary Oliver, contains the namesake for Elizabeth Alexander’s installation “and you didn’t even know enough to be sorry.” She says, “That section of the poem describes the feeling of relief when a storm is visible, but distant enough to not be impacted, yet alludes to an unwitting complicity or affectedness.  Like the poem, there is evidence of time passing and changing the contents of this show: figures sit idly in images while they dissolve, porcelain tableware is worn down into delicate shells, floral decor is dying before one's' eyes. Scavenged domestic forms and floral decor are blended with cast storm debris to imbue these objects of order and comfort with the unpredictability and slow evolution of the natural world. Within these 'beautiful disasters' I work to bring forth the increasing vulnerability within our surroundings often hidden among the pleasantries.  I work to envision the humanity embedded within our surroundings and uncover the porousness of our walls and the interconnectivity we often forget (or ignore) is there.”

About “What Is in Us”

Mara Trachtenberg’s exhibition is an immersive installation of animation, collage and sculpture. Blending hand-cut analog with digital processes, Trachenberg has created a new stop-go animation as well as collages with kaleidoscopic wallpaper designs that both camouflage and reveal troupes of hybridized pollinator-insect / humanoid dancers in various formations. Suspended from the ceiling are larger-than-life paper-mache chrysalis forms outfitted with clusters of miniature mirrors and small motors, doubling as disco-balls. These works are propelled by foundational childhood memories the artist cultivated watching dancers on TV in her family’s living room. 

“What is In Us is informed by my intertwining relationship with joy and hope, my early visual experiences watching dancers against psychedelic backdrops on television and my love of feminist speculative fiction’s stories of societies existing outside of Patriarchal and Capitalist paradigms,” writes Trachtenberg. 

The new work is uncanny and playful, embodying an innate but often hidden capacity for transformation and joy, sending a hopeful message during times of widespread cynicism and collective despair. 

About “Memories Cause Love”

Kailey Coppens exhibits a small selection of framed mixed media works as well as sculptures. Coppens takes a layered graphic approach to create intimately scaled images of empty interiors. Visual composites made with memories of the numerous spaces they have inhabited throughout their life, rooms are described by intersecting lines of bold contrasting colors, modestly skewed perspectives and slightly disproportionate architectural elements. Wallpaper stripes, floor tiles and area rugs are alluded to, but it’s the emptiness that feels the most defined in their small framed works, as well as their coinciding 3-D dioramas. 

In their statement, Coppens writes “ I treat the visual language of home, fabric, trim, hardware, and framing as a vocabulary for fragmentation and repair, presenting domestic space as a container of memories and narratives(…) I explore transitory spaces and thresholds through imagery of windows and doorways, which bridge interiors and exteriors.” 

About Elizabeth Alexander:

Elizabeth Alexander is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in sculptures and installations made of deconstructed domestic materials. She holds degrees in sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy, MFA, and Massachusetts College of Art, BFA, where she discovered the complex nature of dissecting objects of nostalgia. Alexander’s work has been exhibited at institutions across the country including the Museum of Art and Design, National Museum of Women in the Arts, North Carolina Museum of Art, Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, and Nasher Museum. Her work is included in permanent collections at the Crystal Bridges Museum, the  North Carolina Museum of Art, Fidelity, and the Mint Museum.  The National Museum of Women in the Arts included her work in the ‘Women to Watch” series. Alexander has been the recipient of awards from the Harpo foundation, the Society of Arts + Crafts, Blanche E. Colman foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a Burke Prize nominee by the Museum of Arts and Design. Her work has been included in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Denver Post, the Boston Globe, Galerie Magazine, and the Modern Art Notes Podcast. She is represented by K Contemporary. Alexander is currently an Associate Professor and Sculpture Department Coordinator at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA.

About Mara Trachtenberg:

Mara Trachtenberg works in cut-paper stop motion animation, collage, sculpture and installation. Born in Queens and raised in Long Island, New York, she holds a BA in English and Women’s Studies, a BS in Art Education and an MFA in art with a concentration in Photography. Trachtenberg’s Maximalist World Building project, What is In Us Is Among Us explores our world of overstimulation, exploitation and hierarchies both political and social through a feminist lens. Her experimental stop motion animation, Among Us has been screened in “The Experimental Forum”, Los Angeles, CA “The Society for Photographic Education Media Festival”,  St. Louis. MO , “Vastlab Experimental Film Festival”,  Los Angeles, CA  and the “Imagine This, International Women’s International Film Festival”, New York, NY where it received an award for Best Experimental Film. In 2016 and 2020 she received a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography. 

Trachtenberg is an adjunct professor of Media Arts at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Ma, The President of Sutherland Welles, Ltd. and a Board Member at Hera Gallery and Educational Foundation.

About Kailey Coppens:

Kailey Coppens is a multimedia artist who examines the emotional architecture of domestic space through a materially driven, process-oriented practice. They studied Painting and Interdisciplinary Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Using found, mass-produced materials, Coppens constructs sculptural works that exist between object and environment, artifact and interior. Born in California, raised there, as well as in Texas and Massachusetts, their work reflects a life shaped by transience and engages with the ways spaces are built, remembered, and often abandoned.

Their work has been exhibited nationally at institutions including the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (TN), Overlap Gallery (RI), and A Space Gallery (NY), and has been featured in international publications. Coppens is the recipient of the Evelyn Claywell Absher Award for Abstract Art, the Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Monson Arts Award, and the Marcia Lloyd Auction Award. They live and work in Olneyville, Providence, where they maintain a studio practice and work as a teaching artist and picture framer.