Audrey Gair
Rind
Phyllis Baldino, Max Guy & Ellie Rae Hunter
Outliners
October 4 - November 10, 2024
Elly Reitman
energy
August 16 - September 20, 2024
Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024
Jacob Jackmauh, Caitlin McCann & Benjamin Stallings
As for me, I’m just passing through this planet
March 8 - April 14, 2024
Irina Jasnowski Pascual
Wipers
September 15 - October 29, 2023
Coco Klockner
honesty
July 8 - August 6, 2023
Morgan Canavan, Ben Estes, Marisa Takal
More Coming Back & More Returning
May 5 - June 11, 2023
Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022
Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022
Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022
Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Milano Chow, Jenni Crain,
Kristin Dickson- Okuda, Rubens Ghenov, Ann Gillen, KB Jones,
Michael Kennedy Costa, Sean Macalister, Sarah McMenimen,
J. Parker Valentine, Anna Rosen
XX Perfect Souls, curated by Natalie Smith
April 1 - May 6, 2022
Justin Chance, Cameron Cameron, Tristan Higginbotham
Serendipity Trail
February 12 - March 25, 2022
Noah Furman
Beginners
December 3, 2021 - January 25, 2022
Angélique Heidler
Piselli
October 8 - November 19, 2021
Natalie Smith
Nothing Within or Without
August 13 - September 14, 2021
Celia Lesh & Esther Sibiude
A Hole Filled With Noise, curated by Colleen Billing
July 2 - August 2, 2021
E. Saffronia Downing
Field Dug Over
May 21- June 27, 2021
Thew Smoak
Body Without Organs
April 2 - May 2, 2021
Eleanor Conover
Learning From the Steep Slope
March 5 - March 30, 2021
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About
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open by appointment
located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee
Spilled Kibble, detail
Pile of Books 5, 2024, oil paint on linen
Pumpkin 1, 2024, oil paint, thread, fabric, plastic
Pumpkin 1, detail
Cushions, 2024, oil paint on fabric
Pumpkin Print 1, 2024, oil paint and acrylic medium on linen
Rind, installation view
Rind, installation view
Rind
Audrey Gair
November 22- January 4, 2025
Audrey and I both grew up in Florida, where seasonality is marked more by aesthetics than shifts in the weather. Fall is still 90 degrees, the sun blazing while trees stay green and lush. Yet families hang “Happy Fall” signs on front doors, and pumpkins, sweating and sagging in the heat, litter steps and sidewalks. Having lived away from Florida for nearly as long as I lived there, I now find it impossible to think about how I once marked the passage of a year. With no real seasons to ground me, I relied on dates on a calendar and school schedules. Now, living in a place where seasons truly transform the landscape, I feel deeply attuned to their rhythms and how they shape time and give meaning to the year. That warm weather upbringing, though, left its mark—I think about changing seasons constantly. I believe Audrey does too.
This awareness of time, seasonal shifts, and the materials and objects that embody them, sits at the heart of Rind. Throughout the exhibition, Audrey adopts a witty and curious approach to material, using the rind as a metaphor for the outer shell—the part we see, touch, and perceive.
For the show, Audrey was thinking about fall, and rightfully so, pumpkins. Often valued more for their appearance than their taste, the paintings consider the surface of the pumpkin—bright, round, and ridged. In Pumpkin 1, patterned fabric is stitched with rounded seams that call to mind the soft, decorative seasonal décor found in home goods stores. Simplified and abbreviated with smushed, shimmering silver tops encased in a protective plastic, Audrey plays with just how flat a pumpkin can become. Another piece, a monoprint, captures the pumpkin’s symmetry through a fundamental process: painting one quarter of the shape onto plastic, folding it in half, then folding again to create the full image. The wood-planked gallery walls, painted specifically for the exhibition, lay out compositions like a coloring book, offering outlines that invite both adherence and deviation—spaces begging to be filled. Other works continue the dialogue between materiality and perception. A pile of “books”, reduced to rectangular shapes that capture weight and gravity while toying with the line between representation and abstraction. Closed and stacked, these forms offer another vision of an outer shell.
Freedom, experimentation, and trial & error run throughout Rind, yet these works are far from frivolous. On the surface—on the rind— the paintings exude playfulness and provisionality. But when cracked open, they expose a careful understanding of the materiality of painting. Carving out the insides to find a space of her own, Audrey embraces and rejects the history of the medium. Preferring to hold on to all of its messy guts and seeds, pushing and squishing them in her hands. She tells me, “Not everything in the show is a pumpkin, but a lot are”.
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