Small Gestures of Repair | Artists Respond to 2020

April 21 - May 30, 2021

Curator Helen Molesworth, in a recent online talk, described the work of Zoe Leonard as evidence of “art’s small gestures of repair.” During times of conflict and challenge, art and artists can play a particular role in facilitating conversations and healing.

Small Gestures of Repair, a juried exhibition featuring the work of twenty-three artists from across the United States (and one from Austria), reflects the challenges of Year 2020-- a time of global pandemic, ecological disaster, racial unrest, economic crisis, and political contention. The statements of the artists themselves bear witness to the times as they record the living hardships of what it is to be human in a time of dis-ease and frayed edges.

Juror, Joyce Harlow, referenced the very real tension she found evident in the varied pieces in this show--the tension between loneliness, isolation, despair, and fragility on one hand, balanced against the need for expressions of beauty, hope, connection, and “control of the broken pieces” on the other. The works in Small Gestures of Repair explore many layers of obscured reality,  find beauty in imperfections, combine the grotesque with the whimsical, utilize old materials in new ways, take deliberate refuge in meditative practices, and find reparation in, as exhibition artist, Dale Hartley states,  “go[ing] forward instead of stumbling to a stop.”

“We always carry with us our storage or travel bags,” notes artist, Becky Hyberger.  What the viewer of this exhibit finds at the end of 2020’s long journey is a sense of catharsis and more than one gesture of repair embedded in this honest and unfiltered art.

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