Artist Statements

Tiffany Lawson
This work explores the commonalities of transience and imperfection, with a focus on relationships in which they “come together” and “come apart”. My art is created from items and images that are at hand; previous drawings or items/images collected over time. I have found the practice of collecting and arranging to be innate; a process that recovers the past, secures the present, and expects the future. Anchored in my spirituality, culture, and womanhood, I use songs, lyrics, and verse as my mechanism to collect memories; in tandem with the present; choosing objects/images that redefine the story through the lens of “together” and “apart”. The materials begin to ask questions, that a story may be told through the use of color and texture. It is my goal as an artist, to tell stories with familiarity and tactility that considers what lies within “together” and “apart”. This body also includes narratives, written with the intent to capture the subjects’ place in time.

Gloria Ann Shows
I am sensitive to the ways that I relate to place and people. When I allow my mind to wander, it churns backwards and loops, not forward or with fantasy. With enough of these loops, I pinpoint patterns expressed to this day by myself and those around me. Patterns which, at their root, challenge my being and belonging here or there. Material traces of the past such as photographs, videos, notebooks, and letters outline a long-standing sense of rootlessness. I see this rootlessness mirrored in the expanded microhistories of those with whom I cross paths in addition to historical and geographical narratives, equally long-standing. I frame and reframe my memories, remembered and constructed, rendering in the third person an enduring pattern of self-othering.

With printmaking and fiber arts I have imagined distant, nondescript landscapes to reflect my experience of cultural amnesia, assimilation, and the condition of being “in-between.” By layering fragmented narratives onto these landscapes, I make tangible the strained ways I articulate my relationship to place. I reframe personal experience through repetition, accumulation, and the collapse of multiple perspectives. I look back to the ground on which I stood, looking up at, down from, and out to. I look in, toward a thought without words, through filters and fogs at something far away. I recall the divergent visual cultures in my youth and the values housed within them. All the times I’ve been told to look at far away clouds, mountains, and the ocean horizon– I become aware of the space between myself, here, and over there.

Shared Space and related works are a snapshot of previous and ongoing collaborations, displayed to count my blessings and make visual essential human connection and community. I have initiated a series of primarily visual exchanges by hand, snail-mail, and digital formats, to connect with those who I consider touchstones to my distant and webbed community of makers. The selection of artists named with me are those who have impacted my sense of belonging and meaning-making as one who has repeatedly constructed home away from home. Each piece has been touched by someone who has created for me a sense of inclusion and support, many of whom live in-between my two most recent homes of Columbus, OH, and Oklahoma City, OK.

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