The Adah Rose Gallery is pleased to share Safe Havens an online exhibition curated by Laura Augustin a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Laura was mentored by gallery owner Adah Rose Bitterbaum through the Art Table Dc’s mentorship program.

Safe Havens brings together the work of artists Maggie Gourlay and Scott Hazard. Through various media and differing scale, both artists confront aspects of the natural environment and personal experience in relation to it.

Themes of environmentalism and home are apparent in four distinct bodies of work by Maggie Gourlay. Her works dealing with the concept of home evoke both the complexities of comfort versus confinement and our conflicted relationship with the natural world. In her Floorplans series, Gourlay draws blueprints of her former homes with thread from memory. The faint lines and trailing ends correlate to gaps in memory while the bold details represent a strong remembrance. Her recent screenprint series, Wallpapers for a Warming World, deal with issues of invasive species that they are in direct competition with domestic flora.

Scott Hazard’s topographical mixed-media works investigate the relationship between the environment and introspection. The deep ravines and caverns in his constructions offer an escape from the physical environment. It is through these portal-like voids that Hazard explores how the concept of wilderness can shift from nature to the near constant influx of information that defines many of our lives. Much like the invasive species Gourlay refers to directly in her work, this invasion of information vies with our thoughts for space in our psyches.

For more information on this exhibition and upcoming ones please visit – www.adahrosegallery.com

The above work is by Maggie Gourlay “Persistence 3”