(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:
Ideas of what it means to experience and depict nature in the west largely comes from the tradition of 19th-century American landscape painters. These representations, most, if not all, are from the perspective of male artists sent out by colonizers on the mission to capture American land for their own taking.
The exhibition (Un)Focused offers a re-framing of the tradition of landscape representation through women and queer voices that speak to personal experience, shifting narratives, a search for belonging, collective uncertainties, and unstable futures.
The exhibition includes 20 artists working in painting, photography, textiles, drawing, video, collage, and craft that observe, record, recontextualize, and consider a contemporary, lived experience of urban and suburban landscapes.
(Un)Focused considers ordinary, outdoor spaces as necessary respite from the hurry and consumption of modern life. Works in the show zoom in on precise details or specific geometries as a way to zoom out, meditating on inexplicable occurrences and honoring time spent observing. The show advocates for a collectivist understanding of the outdoors as interconnected social spaces with works that explore memory, belonging, and shifting mindsets.
The show reveals liminal spaces of overlooked landscapes as dynamic spaces investigated beyond the calm and stable cadence of traditional landscape representations. Together, the works capture moments of investigating, translating, navigating, and considering an uncertain and unstable future.
Artist in the show:
Lori Buntin, Hannah Chalew, Nicole Fry, Jessica Heikes, Kaitlyn B. Jones, Jessica Kincaid, Madeline Marak, Caroline Minchew, Yuxiao Mu, Katelyn Patton, Mandy Pedigo, Whitney Lea Sage, Carley Schmidt, Francesca Simonite, Tiffany J. Sutton, Gala Reneaum Tello, Chanel Thomas, Katherine Toler, Carolyn Wiedeman, Arin Yoon.
