EXHIBITIONS
Patty Carroll: Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise and Disaster
June 7th, 2024 through August 4th, 2024
Patty Carroll has been known for her use of highly intense, saturated color photographs since the 1970’s. Her recent project, “Anonymous Women,” consists of a 4-part series of studio installations made for the camera, addressing women and their complicated relationships with domesticity. The artist writes the following on the works in this series.
My work is about entangling women and home, leading to the phrase “housewife.” All of the photographs are reimagined interior spaces of rooms filled with décor and objects, featuring a lone figure of a woman, engulfed in her interior. She is both a victim of her possessions and obsessions, as well as the invisible creator of such; both satisfying and problematic, pathetic and humorous. Her home has become a site of tragedy and danger, with scenes of hilarious and heartbreaking mishaps. I use a female mannequin to stand in for the “perfect” woman, as she never has issues of aging, weight gain, acne or other normal human complexities.
Jeffly Gabriela Molina and Brad Stumpf: Esta Casa es un Cuerpo
April 6th, 2024 through May 26th, 2024
Esta Casa Es Un Cuerpo / This House Is a Body invites its audience to think about love, self-love and love as a couple, and also invites you to contemplate the shared dreams that sustain a family. It compels us to ask, what is a home? While it answers: a place where hope lives and is built, contained, and organized alongside my partner’s habits and belongings. These works are whispers of truth and function like deep breaths held in the midst of a daydream.
The artists Brad Stumpf and Jeffly Gabriela Molina celebrated their union in 2020 during the lockdown that resulted from the pandemic. For a period of two years, they resided in a small apartment alongside Molina’s parents, who had recently emigrated from crisis-ridden Venezuela. The works in this exhibition were made in a time of great uncertainty (political, physical and financial); they were not made as a deviation from reality, but as a kernel of hope for which to reach and hold. Molina grew up in San Cristobal, an Andean city located in a mountainous region of Western Venezuela. Stumpf grew up in rural Illinois, outside the village of Hamel, in Madison County. Each artist uses a different visual vocabulary to teach each other about their different backgrounds and to express how they feel about building a home together.
Marina Ross: Emerald City
November 10th, 2023 through January 28th, 2024
Emerald City, a selection of oil paintings by Marina Ross in which the artist explores the connections between loss, home and belonging. Ross began mining the iconic American fairytale The Wizard of Oz (1939) in the summer of 2022, after the tragic loss of her son, as an index to cultural and personal memory. Witnessing the rise and fall of beloved performers from her youth, Ross initially investigated the impact of trauma on young, female performers such as Brittany Murphy, Britney Spears and Judy Garland. The current work takes a closer look at the impact of The Wizard of Oz on Judy Garland’s later life and as a reflection of the film’s icons such as the farmhouse, the Emerald City, and the poppies, in addition to the nature of the iconic film itself. The works in the exhibition are connected through the teal color of patination found on architectural domes and through college campuses. This color occurs naturally when metals are exposed to oxygen over an extended period of time but can also be achieved artificially through chemical alteration to achieve the highly sought after beauty of old age. The focus on architecture in the exhibition reflects the permanence, legacy, and transcendence of ubiquitous icons in our cultural history.
Matt Bodett: Of Exceptions
September 22nd through November 2nd, 2023
Challenging us to each confront our own psychology, Matt Bodett’s solo exhibition Of Exceptions utilizes a variety of media to approach each viewer with a unique opportunity to examine their own subjectivity. Drawing from contemporary psychiatric intake forms, baroque portraits of Napoleon, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings, and a variety of other culturally important artworks, Bodett extends our understanding of language and meaning-making to move beyond classically assumed linearity. This complex approach to his practice, and to the artworks presented, derive from his lived experience with schizoaffective disorder (schizophrenia accompanied by a mood disorder – severe depression in Bodett’s case). This lived experience has offered Bodett a unique vantage point in a world which too often claims authority over phenomenology, psychiatry, and culture. Offering us a chance to explore the exceptions, Bodett’s work is deeply personal, historically challenging, and poetically relevant.
Ricardo Mondragon: Musica Universalis
June 9th through September 3rd, 2023
Our cosmos is built on musical dimensions, audible and inaudible. Nature interweaves harmonic relationships via waves manifesting in phenomena such as brainwaves, ripples of clouds, planetary orbits, atoms, circadian rhythms, a flock of birds, a school of fish, light, spacetime, and everything else. Crest by crest and trough under trough, waves harmonize, creating beautiful anatomies. The body of work presented at Artruss Gallery is a compendium of harmonic waves modulated into sculptural work, along with prints depicting particles and vibrations. While making this work, it has become more evident that music is the path to cosmic knowledge.
Dabin Ahn: 1st Dibs
April 14th through May 26th, 2023
1stDibs, the painter and sculptor’s first solo show with the gallery. The works on view explore finding emotion in inanimate objects, specifically decorative figurines. Growing up surrounded by his mother’s collection of porcelain dinnerware, Ahn became interested in the concept of these objects’ simultaneous permanence and fragility. Left untouched they can last forever, yet they easily shatter. The porcelain figurines he captures encompass the same brittle delicacy. Ahn’s inspiration stems from images of vintage figurines on auction websites. Using these photos as a jumping off point, he creates a narrative for each one. By distorting the original images and adding such things as a reflection in the eye or a tear down a face, he instills emotions in the objects—emotions that viewers can relate to on a deeply personal level. “More than anything else, the eyes reveal who a person truly is. In1stDibs, Ahn encourages his viewers to consider how these works capture their own personal narratives.
Thomas Masters: Into The Void
October 27th through December 4th, 2022
Inaugural Exhibition:
Alexander Richard Wilson, Melissa Leandro, Jacqueline Surdell, Titus Wonsey, Jeffly Gabriela Molina, Patty Carroll, Dabin Ahn, and Zachary Weber
September 22nd through October 24th, 2022
Zachary Weber
Zachary Weber
Patty Carroll
Patty Carroll
Jeffly Gabriela Molina
Jeffly Gabriela Molina
Alexander Richard Wilson
Alexander Richard Wilson
Dabin Ahn
Melissa Leandro
Titus Wonsey
Jacqueline Surdell
Jacqueline Surdell
Alexander Richard Wilson, Jacqueline Surdell
Titus Wonsey
Titus Wonsey