February 17 – 21
Closing Reception: Friday, February 21, 5-7pm
Location: Gallery 7, Humanities Building, 7th Floor, 455 N Park St, Madison, WI
This Heart a Tender Chamber is a record of the soft, ever-cycling home archive, a piece often missing from a history that documents the public queer struggle for acceptance and human rights. The textiles and paintings within respond to a question that has been ever under the surface in queer representation: How do we capture, represent, and uplift experiences of the vulnerable self, while contending with a system that expects surveillance, over-exposure, and access to our most private interiors?
Blankets, towels, and soft home objects reference the body without revealing it—coverage becomes a form of portraiture that does not ask for the presence of a body. Dreamy painted scenes explore these emotional tensions of bureaucratic procedures and financial documentation that loom beneath the warmth of personal and relational exchanges in privacy. This exhibition offers a small window into the large abiding tenderness—caring, painful, vulnerable—that fills the artist and her home.