March 9 - April 7, 2024

Opening reception on Second Saturday, March 9, 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.

Programming This Month:

Sunday, March 10, 2pm

Room 1

Overdressed and Unemployed
Liza Seelig

For the past few years, I worked as an onset costumer in film & TV. Due to the strike, I haven’t worked a union job in 14 months. Initially, I was uncertain about the future of my career but was hesitant to get a 9-5 job. What skills do I have other than steaming clothes, removing stains and doing a quick stitch fix? So I filed for unemployment and thought about how to use this time as an opportunity to advance my career with the skills that I already have. 

With the help of Nick Shamblott, we produced my first photoshoot about a year ago. Since then, I’ve produced, conceptualized and styled numerous others. My goal of these shoots is to bring together creatives, who have also been affected by the strike. To make something high quality without money. And to expand networks, skills and portfolios with low pressure and low stakes. 

These shoots don’t necessarily have an impactful message. They aren’t particularly deep. They’re my form of self-expression. If there’s a message that I’m trying to relay, it’s that styling doesn’t have to be unaffordable or unattainable. Fashion does not equate to owning designer clothes, yet there are many alternatives to fast fashion. As a vintage collector, I try to style sustainable clothes as much as possible. I try to rent, borrow and shop locally. I hope that is evident in my work. 

In hindsight, I see this time off as a gift rather than a hindrance. I’m now being hired as a stylist, and I’m able to stay financially afloat. I can feel my career shifting in a different direction. The right direction. I attribute this to these silly photoshoots that I post on my silly instagram. They have filled a void (and my vintage coin purse) that the strike had left empty. I feel some morsel of purpose again. I don’t know if styling makes me an artist, but it makes me happy.

I'm Liza Seelig, a stylist and creative proudly based and raised in New Orleans. I am passionate about colors, textures and patterns. I enjoy creating juxtapositions with unexpected pairings and layering. As a 478 IATSE union member, my main source of income comes from costuming for feature film and television, but since the strike I began working in commercial, editorial, and music video styling.

@bluejeanbabayy
https://www.lizaseeligstyling.com/

Room 2

Whitney Humphreys, Horse Skull Headstone, 2024, Machine embroidery on quilted fabric and salvaged vinyl, & Rebecca Mae Sexton, Widow Maker, 2024, Photocopy transfer of a family photograph of grandparents on chiffon, holding remnants of the historical foundation of the family homestead.

Seaming Apparitions
Whitney Humphreys & Rebecca Mae Sexton

“Seaming Apparitions” is a collection of mixed media works by Whitney Humphreys and Rebecca Mae Sexton that employ methods of image reproduction and fiber art to render visible the threads binding the industrial to the domestic. In this collaborative investigation of personal and collective memory, signifiers of a culturally constructed dichotomy dividing soft from hard, or body from land, are blurred, enmeshed, and conflated. In these works, historically gendered forms of engineering are positioned as linked contributors in the production of identity. Textile manipulation, structural fabrication, and mechanical reproduction are employed to produce objects whose form and content invite viewers to consider what is forged and what is lost when the intergenerational exchange of embodied knowledges is outsourced to machines.

Whitney Humphreys is a San Francisco Bay Area artist and teacher.  Her research-based, multi-media practice fuses collage with traditional printmaking, fiber art, and installation in works that address how visual culture and information technologies influence the production of gender identity. She received an MA & MFA from SFAI, where she earned awards in Printmaking, Metal Sculpture and Thesis Writing. She is currently leading Printmaking courses at UC Santa Cruz and has exhibited across the U.S.
@witchneyjoanne
whitneyhumphreys.com

Rebecca Mae Sexton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, based in San Francisco. Working at the intersection of photography, installation, and performance, her work tends to the unseen residues of gendered violence, grief, extractive resource practices, and colonization left on families, more-than-human kin, and land. She earned a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College (Annapolis), an MFA in Studio Art at the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently teaching art history to high school students in San Francisco. 
@rebecca.mae.sexton
rebeccasexton.net

Room 3

Hayley Sam Jensen, Cypress in Yellow, Show Promotion Flyer, 2024.
Hayley Sam Jensen, Cypress in Mist, Acrylic on repurposed greenhouse plastic, 2024.
Hayley Sam Jensen, Cypress in Blue, Acrylic on repurposed greenhouse plastic, 2024.

Recognizing Home: Cypress Series
Hayley Sam Jensen

These works came from my homesickness and a harsh reality of not knowing my home in ways that matter greatly to me. Each painting is based off of photos taken by the local photographer Julia Sims from her book on Manchac Swamp. I first became interested in the swamp that sidles Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain while driving to and from New Orleans and Hammond for farm work. The old bald cypresses in the dawn are haunting in a way that Southern Louisiana must pose itself as a grand home for ghosts, spirits, and the lost. The cypress tree is said to be a symbol in ancient mythology for the realm of the dead or planted in honor of the dead near cemeteries and grave sites. I learned this, along with the cypress trees’ symbolism as the tree of Louisiana, after I recently left my home New Orleans to move on to a new home and a new life. While these trees honor death within a deteriorating coast, they are actively holding ground, purifying the water from pollution, and offering home to native species. The materials I used for these works are scraps from homes new and old, pieces of plastic which in itself is a material of the dead, a material formed by death and causing death while completely ghostly in its own cycles through human hands. In this show Recognizing Home: Cypress Series, I grapple with my homesickness and lack of full awareness around my home’s natural environment. The bald cypress trees in this series hold my attempt at recognizing Louisiana’s environmental deaths and spirits, pollution and disappearance, as well as the naturally occuring beneficial actions of the native bald cypress tree. 

Hayley Sam Jensen is a Gulf Coast based visual artist, horticulturist and teacher. Originally from the New Orleans area, Jensen received her BFA in Painting from Louisiana State University and later went on to receive her MFA in Studio Art from San Francisco Art Institute. Her paintings, often on saved and repurposed plastics, focus on the impacts of climate change and pollution as well as how heavily they weigh on the mental state personally and communally. Jensen has shown her work across the US and in London, and she has worked with farms and gardens throughout the Gulf Coast, particularly interested in native plants and organic growing practices. 

@haysamjensen
https://www.hayleysamanthajensen.com/

Room 4

Sarah D’Ambrosio, Bathhouse Boys, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48 inches, 2024. 
Morgan Hobbs, Strata, oil, acrylic and papier mache on panel, 12 x 8 inches, 2024.
Sarah D’Ambrosio, Venik Massage, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48 inches, 2024. 
Morgan Hobbs, Books, Buildings and Bricks (The Ten Commandments), papier mache on painted panel, 12 x 12  inches, 2023.

Bulky Goods
Sarah D'Ambrosio and Morgan Hobbs

My recent oil paintings focus on the atmosphere of memory and imagination as they take place in various Bathhouses and Saunas. Through the use of large composed male bodies I explore my  interest in the language of movement and gesture, form, and physicality of paint.
-Sarah D'Ambrosio

Modern humans genetically resemble the earliest homo sapiens, but knowledge passed between generations accelerates complex cultural advancements. My work seeks connections in the full trajectory of human history from the ancients to present times and the future. 

In Philadelphia - a city full of culture - carved stone symbols provide both decorative and symbolic significance while intermixing with the structural pieces of historic buildings. While some of these symbols have ancient origins, I recreate them using pulverized bits of printed, local news. They are literally and figuratively disconnected from their structural supports. Then I stack them in precarious groupings, so they appear somewhat structured but not necessarily placed in their intended position. These new haphazard orientations invite fresh interpretations of the symbolic encoding of these pieces. The stacks begin to feel like ruins, fragments from the future when Philadelphia is in the past.
-Morgan Hobbs

Sarah D’Ambrosio was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BFA from Brooklyn College and continued her studies at The Mount Gretna School of Art in Pennsylvania. She holds a Masters from the University of New Hampshire. D’Ambrosio has exhibited at The Painting Center (New York, NY), NYSS Projects (New York, NY) and Blue Mountain Gallery (New York, NY), among others. Her forthcoming solo exhibition will be presented at MARCH in 2024. D’Ambrosio lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
@sarah_Dambrosio_ 
https://www.sarahdambrosio.com/

Morgan Hobbs is an artist from Kansas City, Missouri. Hobbs studied historical and prehistoric archaeology in conjunction with her fine arts training. Now living in Philadelphia, these investigations take on new meaning and urgency, and through her art practice, Hobbs seeks a deeper understanding of the visions and symbols depicted around her. Hobbs has shown her paintings and sculptures both regionally and nationally, including at Satellite Projects in Miami; 33 Orchard in the Lower East Side; Art Market Hamptons in Water Mill, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia. She has presented her work and writing at Mount Gretna School of Art; Texas A&M International University, Laredo, TX; Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia; Pennsylvania College of Art and Design; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the National Conference for Undergraduate Research, Ogden, Utah; and more. In 2012 and 2020, she attended Vermont Studio Center as an Artist in Residence, and in 2020, she was awarded a Hemera Contemplative Fellowship. Hobbs is represented by VSOP Projects in New York and Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.
@morganraquelhobbs
www.morganhobbs.com