UPCOMING

MYTHOLOGY/MATRIARCHY

GROUP EXHIBITION
MARCH 14-APRIL 27, 2025

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, MARCH 14, 6-8PM

Sustainable Arts Foundation Artist/Writer Panel with Nancy Reddy, Author of The Good Mother Myth: March 29th, 4-6pm

CLOSING RECEPTION: SUNDAY, APRIL 27, 2-4PM

The Middle Room is pleased to present Mythology/Matriarchy, a group exhibit of allegorical works centered on otherworldly and powerful female protagonists by contemporary artists Liv Aanrud, Susan Arena, Alexandra Carter, Vivien Ebright Chung, Christine Garvey, Erika b Hess, Kelly Lynn Jones, Aline Mare, Sarana Mehra, and Amy Talluto. The exhibition will be on view from March 14 - April 27, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Friday, March 14, from 6-8pm.

Mythology/Matriarchy is an exhibition curated by Shannon Rae Fincke to coincide with both Women’s History Month and Earth Day—and in dialogue with the newly released book by Nancy Reddy, The Good Mother Myth, along with the work of Sustainable Arts Foundation. This feminist interdisciplinary curation centers on the earthly and mystic interrelation between the both tangible and ethereal transcendent female-forward chorus of works by ten women artists. The at once historical, mythical and timely conversation between the dreamlike psychological, sociological, and experiential narratives in this group exhibition—coupled with the pragmatic text by Nancy Reddy and Sustainable Arts Foundation’s ongoing support of creative practices, community and structural reforms—contextualizes and amplifies women’s lives, lineages, contributions, power and voices, within the pendulum of history and currently threatening times.

The Middle Room is open Saturdays & Sundays from 1-3pm—for inquiries & appointments, contact Info@TheMiddleRoomGallery.com

Liv Aanrud lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Drawing from personal experiences and travels, her lush, maximalist compositions depict female figures as doubles, inviting the viewer to wonder whether they are reflections, two separate figures or one woman in various stages of being. Their bodies are ornate, and the objects depicted within their framework are at once symbols, clues to a narrative, or perhaps they point at interconnectedness: a rejection of the human vs nature binary. Aiming to disrupt the traditional male gaze by blurring the boundaries of figure and ground; the women merge seamlessly with their surroundings and are totally integrated into a post-patriarchal world. Through intricate details and a psychedelic palette, Aanrud transports viewers to a dreamlike utopia where they are left to slowly and joyously decode the language of these bodies. She earned her B.F.A in painting (2001) from the University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire and her M.F.A (2011) from Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University.

Susan Arena lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. The characters in her paintings and sculptures bring into question how the female body holds a new kind of power as seen through the modern gaze–mother, monster, adventurer, sex goddess–a multitude of signifiers, held in a single vessel. Concepts of feminism are essential but limiting. Arena’s work evokes the beautiful messiness of being female and reckons with how the art and the objects we create make us human. Through a contemporary lens, she employ images of the female goddess made by ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans and Mesopotamians. The goddess feels timeless like the earth mother. But like earth, it’s spinning and changing all the time. The goddess represents the power of the human life force, of eternal consciousness, of the muse, and a connection to the ultimate power of creation. She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from Yale School of Art, and studied drawing and painting at the New York Studio School.

Alexandra Carter lives and works in San Diego, CA. Her figurative paintings using alternative media and surfaces emphasize a visceral mark and refer to the body permeating beyond its own boundaries explore the sensations of the female through themes of fertility, maternity, and the monstrous feminine—which emphasizes the female reproductive body as the core of the monstrous, pitting it against patriarchal views. Carter draws from her upbringing on a cranberry farm in New England as well as literature. In her paintings, figures perform a sumptuous dance between the maternal and the grotesque. The body is often subsumed in pregnancy, postpartum, or caregiving. She received an MFA from Goldsmiths University of London in 2015 and a BA from Rhodes College in Memphis in 2009.

Vivien Ebright Chung lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her understanding and interest in the body, clothed and unclothed, has hugely influenced the direction of her painting. Using lush sensual mark making and rich color, she explores the ongoing conflict between the sensual nature of humanity and the intellectual and spiritual. Drawing on familiar tropes of art history and literature her work aims to document the inescapable joy and sorrow of being human. She uses life drawing as well as personal experience, motherhood and friendships to draw upon as subjects for her works. Ebright Chung makes paintings that depict aspects of herself, wanting the viewer to feel wrapped up in her, without ever having met. She received her BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, where she took interdisciplinary classes in both fashion and painting. Her understanding and interest in the body, clothed and unclothed, has hugely influenced the direction of her painting.

Christine Garvey lives and works in Austin, TX. Interested in ruin, she draws and sculpts as a way to process fears around the body’s vulnerabilities and inevitable failings. Her work from the last four years deals specifically with anxieties around ruin and motherhood - the transformation of flesh, the violence of birth, and the collapse of identity that comes with making and mothering another. Influenced by classical Italian depictions of motherhood: the grotesque elongation of limbs in Parmigianino’s Madonna with the Long Neck, the bleeding breasts in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Mother and Child among others. Garvey’s work is also influenced by the natural world - how wolves, snakes, and other animals transform as they become mothers. She finds something exciting in the idea that mothering brings forth the monstrous within each of us and is interested in the unusual power that emerges when we become our most grotesque, animate selves. She received her BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis, and her MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Montreal.

Erika b Hess lives and works in Columbus, OH and also maintains a studio practice in Long Island City, NY. She paints because she is a woman who is lost—not minding being lost; preferring to seek and discover what we can experience in small, cloaked moments. Spotting a reflection in a puddle and seeing our world in a two-dimensional mirror rooted to the earth-the sky on the ground, our face at our feet. Hess’s paintings are psychological landscapes that communicate emotions and experiences through the vibrant language of color, anchoring itself in the recurring motif of puddles. Puddles, symbolizing emotions and experiences, are fleeting pools of water that mirror their surroundings. They materialize with the rain and vanish just as swiftly, paralleling the impermanence of human experience. Puddles also serve as metaphors for our past and future. They tend to form in the same location, etching impressions in the environment much like how our experiences deepen pathways within our psyche. She received her BFA from Wright State University and MFA from Boston University, and is the creator of the art podcast I Like Your Work.

Kelly Lynn Jones lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She uses painting as a magical tool to stop time. Referencing her daily life, Jones paints imagined spaces at the intersection of the real and whimsical. She looks for tender moments of reflection, and flora and fauna are her guides through the seasons and act as symbols of the temporality of all things. Jones' paintings are colorful and pattern-filled snapshots featuring the romantic and playful as she explores the natural world, motherhood, the objects we surround ourselves with, memory, and the wistful. She earned a BFA and MFA from the College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Aline Mare lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Exploring mythic lore and legend since her early years as a performance artist and experimental filmmaker in downtown New York; goddesses, crones, and demons have nurtured Mare’s imagery. The human body, the earth, nature, life, death and the phenomenon of transformation have always been at the root of her work. With Mare’s recent mixed media series printed large scale on illuminated glass and metal, she has continued to create her own mythic narrative, adding images of mica, crystals, gold and other elements to suggest powerful geological forces of subduction and change. Reinterpreting sculptural works from Greek and Roman antiquity photographed on recent trips to Europe, Mare finds a language of the body that conveys these ancient mythic narratives through the lens of natural history and the human endeavor to comprehend the world around us—conveying both the passage of time and the collapse of the physical world, speaking of power through the senses, igniting and illuminating the known and unknown. She completed undergraduate work at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for Media Studies and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute.

Sarana Mehra lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her multidisciplinary art stems from long standing research into historic and extant systems of language, technology, and institutions for medicine and belief. As a disabled person whose very existence has relied upon almost constant medical interventions, many experimental—much of her life has been spent on the cutting edge of human progress. Stemming from personal experience as a “sick person,” she investigates the fine line between science and belief, acknowledging that despite our monumental scientific and medical advancements, the unease of disease still pulls at the threads of civilization. A bi-racial British-American artist, she earned her BFA from the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art at the University of Oxford & her MFA from Central Saint Martins’ in London, UK.

Amy Talluto lives and works in Upstate NY. Her work is inspired by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s painting Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn, Princesse de Broglie (1825–1860) which hangs at the Metropolitian Museum of Art, and reminds her of her mother. Like a magic act, when Talluto paints the eyes of the Princesse, her mother appears. The eyes are mysteriously the same as the deeply hooded, darkly-askance eyes of the sitter. She is slightly melancholy, looking at something out of frame, lost in thought. The possession requires only shoulders and up - and always eyes. The eyes are the magic center. Talluto enjoys testing the phenomenon by placing the eyes and sometimes the silhouette of the sitter in new imagined environments: half-submerged in the ocean, peering out from a cloud or architectural niche, jumbled up with other symbols, bending like a flower. Her mother always stares back. She earned her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is the creator of the podcast, Pep Talks for Artists.

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