Contemporary landscape painters Alice Stone Collins, Jamaal Peterman, and Mark Bradley-Shoup are featured in the exhibition “Out There is What’s Left.” The reception at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts—the downtown gallery space for the University of Louisville’s Hite Institute of Art and Design—is Friday, March 1. These works consider how we occupy social spaces and how the places we call home unconsciously map who we become.
Alice Stone Collins paints dreamlike scenes of suburban homes transmogrified by surreal imagery. Her work is informed by her own consideration of what home means. More specifically, her works asks what it means to call a place home when it is situated on land named for a Confederate general who once tried to make homes impossible for millions of Black Americans and before that, and before that had been home of the Creek Indians, who who lived in villages along the Chattahoochee River for thousands of years.
The abstract paintings of Jamaal Peterman explore the ways that the inherent constraints of public housing, the destruction of historically Black neighborhoods, and continuing socioeconomic segregation limit the movements of Black and Brown bodies. Peterman’s landscapes depict not only Black and Brown bodies within these spaces, but also present a visual counterpoint: a simulated space where these bodies are able to move about freely.
The serene yet haunting landscapes of Mark Bradley-Shoups suggest the effects of an ever-expanding industrialized nation that is simultaneously in constant development and constant decline. The exhibition will be open until April 20.
Out There is What’s Left
Friday, March 1
5 p.m.
100 E. Main St.
Free entry
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 12, 2024.
