FUTURE EXHIBITIONS
Rooted in Place
Kathryn Keller | June 5 - September 19 | Commons Gallery
Rooted In Place is an exhibition that focuses on a curated selection of Kathryn Keller's oil paintings on canvas and paper and a select number of her watercolors on paper. The works range from a few examples going as far back as 2014 to recent work from 2024.
Keller has become very well-known especially throughout the south for her landscapes, mostly depicting central Louisiana. Specifically, her work often illustrates scenes of Inglewood Farm located in Alexandria, Louisiana where Keller primarily resides. Inglewood Farm sits on 3,000 acres. It is one of the largest Farms in Central, Louisiana. The farm is home to a sizable concentration of majestic pecan trees who tower above the ever-expanding majestic farmland.
Keller paints almost exclusively from life, as she captures not only the physical surroundings of what is in front of her, but the energy contained within the specific environment she finds herself working within. Rooted in Place will include some of her large landscapes such as "It Astounds Me," which features a window into a view of the Inglewood landscape in winter as well many of her watercolor works. The watercolors often have a softer, more intimate feel to them, rooted in the places and objects that surround Keller wherever she is. Rooted in Place will feature works such as "Bleakhouse 11_14_19" where the intimate and cozy scene of Kathryn's fireplace of her home in Alexandria,
Embodied: The Power of Presence.
Suzanne Scott Constantine & Lynne Scott Constantine June 5 - September 19 | West Wing Gallery
Spend any time on social media today, and you’ll come across people yearning for “embodied” experience—what we used to call “living,” before so much of our living became mediated seeing and hearing.
What does it mean, to be “embodied”? Is it to say that I have a self, and my body is that self? However wonderful it feels to emerge from a room of glowing screens to feel the warmth of the sun, how small am I if my precious self is simply the sum of sensuous experience?
Or perhaps embodiment is a consciousness peeping out from a body—a mind, piloting a machine that gathers perceptions and manufactures thoughts out of them. A mind/machine seems just right for a digital world, except that the digital world ultimately feels like the mind/machine itself: a prison with no escape.
No, not a machine. And perhaps not even a unitary body/self, because I cannot survive without the trillions of microbes that manage vital functions for my living. You cannot survive without the interconnected web of environment, animals, plants, and other humans spinning with you on this globe. As artist Cannupa Hanska Luger said, “There is a hole inside your environment the shape of you. Can you fit back in?”
The body is not just a collection of senses and functions: it is a language that craves being understood but fears being spoken for. The bodies we offer in this exhibition are stories, metaphors, evocations of an interconnected space of creative thought. The way we, as women artists, present these stories connects us to a tradition of women artists who step outside of classic figuration: surrealists, icon makers, craftswomen, visionaries.
The people who inspired and, in some cases, collaborated in this work are an assortment of women with extraordinary stories to tell through the language of their bodies. And what we see in their embodied language does not merely concern women. All of us have the same question: What does it look like to have personal autonomy, a sense of one’s place in the world, and a presence that challenges preconceived ideas of what can and should be?
As the writer Ocean Vuong has said, “You have to articulate the world you want to live in, first.”
Consider our artworks as “open questions,” inviting you to think more deeply about what living in your particular body at this particular moment feels like to you, and what it might portend for tomorrow.
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Lynne Scott Constantine Suzanne Scott Constantine