Odd Room
2022
Odd Room highlights the work of the five resident artists at Millville Studios working in separate spaces, but under one roof during this stretch of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The show is situated in the basement of the building and takes inspiration from Weronika Zielinska-Klein’s “Guestroom Project,” where she invited artists to work in the “odd room” in her family’s home. The project was interpreted as being born of her experience as a new mother, her embodiment of maternal care colliding and informing her artistic practice and vice versa*. Odd Room is an opportunity to engage as a community of artists, highlight new modes of working and connecting while experiencing new life rhythms, performing new rituals of care and inhabiting spaces anew. The show honors the way we negotiate our new realities, where time operates differently and things may be awkward, provisional, or vague and where artists are encouraged to make the odd work.
Curated by: Sara Hubbs
*Epp Buller, R. & Reeve, C. (2019). Hospitality as Ethical and Creative Responsiveness in the Work of Weronika Zielinska-Klein, Inappropriate Bodies, Art, Design, and Maternity (p. 336). Demeter Press
Install Images by: Maya Hawk
Artists Bios:
Susanna Battin is interested in how images shape people’s relationships with land, and the performance of images within the history of colonization of the West. She works between video, cartography, collage, painting, social action, and reading legal documents and nature poems.
C. E. Fitzgerald has been making self-portraits in the basement of his studio, away from the view of onlookers and dog walkers. His photographs are sometimes humorous and almost always awkward.
Ryan Hill uses images and text to make drawings that appear to be spontaneous, accessible and conceptual. His installations and site-specific performances are psychological, questioning assumptions we have about ourselves and how we make sense of the world.
Sara Hubbs addresses concepts of care, intimacy, and temporality at work in relationships, specifically within an intergenerational framework. Her work is comprised of many different materials that transform across various processes and situational placements.
Erik Schmahl is a landscape designer and educator exploring the spaces between art, geography, landscape architecture, and ecology. His work involves stones arranged next to plants, often accidentally in and intentionally out of context.