(un) Focused, curated by Madeline Marak

Main Gallery, May 15 – July 3, 2026

Opening Reception: First Friday, June 5, 2026, from 5:00 – 9:00 PM

Closing Reception: First Friday – July 5 , 2026, 5:00 – 8:00 PM 

Curator and artist Madeline Marak curates a show of women artists who create images within lived experiences, which explore the relationship between urban and suburban, personal spaces, belonging, and a collective uncertain future.  Marak brings together artists whose work intends to prompt the viewer to re-consider, re-connect, and re-examine ordinary spaces and familiar, yet uncharted spaces.

From the Curatorial Statement:

As a person moving through the world, I am easily overwhelmed by all of the visual information that vies for my attention. I take back control of my focus with my camera in hand, capturing the spaces of my immediate surroundings. I use the landscapes I experience in my day-to-day life as a guide for connection and create paintings and photographs that depict my impulse to represent, recreate, capture, and cultivate my surroundings.

(un) Focused is a group exhibition of my work along with other women artists that create images within a lived experience. Images that explore the contentious relationship between cities and suburbs. Images that capture personal spaces, belonging, a collective uncertain future, familiar yet uncharted places. Images that honor a life lived, despite all of the horrors around us.

I find commonality in the artists using imagery that calls the viewer to re-consider, re-connect, and re-examine ordinary spaces. The works seem to zoom in, dialing in on something complex that exists in certainty as a way to zone out, softening the focus away from what is undetermined and uncertain. The works mark a moment of making sense of things- meditating on the real to better understand the mystery of what’s at hand. I think these works offer a response to the un-setting moment we are in. They offer a window into how we cope with uncertainty, creating systems for understanding and seeing the world.

I find that works are echoed by the writings of Rick Rubin, “The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and mundane and to get to what might otherwise be invisible.” The Creative Act, Awareness and Alan Lightman, “Intellect accounts for abstract thought, but our emotional reality is limited by what we can touch with our bodies in the timespan of our lives”- Our Place in the Universe, and Rebecca Solnit, “To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.” Other authors such as Lucy Lippard, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gaston Bachelard, and Wendell Berry have offered insightful words that complement my findings.