Tending To..: MFA Thesis by Amari Becker, Absorb-Reflect-Refract: MFA Thesis by Isabel Heiland

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 19, 2025, from 4:00-7:00 pm
Closing Reception: Sunday, April 27,2025, from 2:00-4:30 pm

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday through Friday from 12:00-4:00 pm

In their separate yet related Graduate Thesis Exhibitions, Amari Becker and Isabel Heiland share works that include sculpture, weaving, drawing, installation, photography, and field research. Both artists explore and question their relationships within a diverse, enmeshed multi-species planet. Rainbows are found in burned remains. Plastic is remembered as a descendant of long-gone forests. The theme of more-than-human interconnectedness imbues the works with both grief and love.

Exhibition curated by Elie Porter Trubert — http://www.elieportertrubert.com/

Tending to…
Art Talk: Monday, April 21, 2025, 11:00 am
Tending to… honors the sentience of material-beings. Grandmother’s prayers weave across a milpa farmer’s hands. Buttons sprout from twisted poplar. Peanuts growing spices, pigments, seeds, and plastic remains hang stitched with heirloom threads encased in paraffin wax, bringing the latest updates on exchange rates. The bricolage beings of garbologist Amari Becker’s thesis installation stitch together bits of detritus with medicinal plants and family heirlooms. Amari’s interest in movements, places, and stories drives their research to trace repeating systems and patterns. Over a decade of working in documentary filmmaking and commercial television propels questions about power and cultural production. Family dreams intersect local myths, national systems, and global infrastructure to create a body of whimsical beings brimming with contradiction.

Absorb – Reflect – Refract
Artist Talk, Monday, April, 2025, 1:00 pm
Informed by first-hand experience in forestry and field research in places altered by fire, Colorado artist Isabel Heiland shares the beauty of disturbed landscapes in Absorb-Reflect-Refract. Through her work, she examines how natural areas, specifically the coniferous forests of Colorado and New Mexico’s Rocky Mountains, transform and reciprocate through trauma, growth, disaster, relationships, time, and love. Looking at these changes from the outside prompted Isabel to examine the ways that she herself transforms under stress and care, and how she reflects that back into the world. And, ultimately, the beauty she finds around her–whether intact or heavily disturbed–has led to her acceptance of constant change and chaos as part of life.