May 16 - June 14, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday. May 16 (6 - 9pm)

Laura Jean Foster writes:

As caddisflies build provisional, necessary shelters from the brick-a-brack of their environment, I make work with what comes to hand, be it lath once used to shore up plaster walls or pantry doors from now empty cupboards, fabricating improvised structures as a way to think about power frameworks, domestic instability, human resilience, and self-sufficiency. The reification of my own experience of unsettledness and effort, this practice is an action against complacency and acquiescence, a movement towards presence and voice.

Painting and drawing are an intrinsic part of my practice, both as plans for hypothetical objects and as uncanny signals, inscrutable scraps of language, marks of human record. Found crocheted and sewn fragments are inserted throughout the works, forms of craft that require minimal skill yet can create the self-sufficiency to satisfy the human need for warmth and desire for comfort and beauty. These insertions may appear whimsical, but in fact are attempts at autonomy and agency, revealing my aim to find ways to give power to the less powerful.

The sculptural objects, often assembled from discarded materials of housing construction, are precarious things, seemingly built quickly and barely standing. Perhaps they lean slipshod in the corner, or poise, jittery and scanty, in the middle of the room, evoking an uneasy, persistent presence. Alluding to architectural models of the propertied and powerful in their scale, they instead suggest the models of those living in the periphery, without comfort and surety. These structures, on the verge of falling apart, manage to stay upright, and in this way become a meditation on the precariousness of life and the need for collective liberation from income inequality and housing insecurity.