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
★
About
Instagram
★
open by appointment
located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee
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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
July 12 - July 29, 2024
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
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
★
About
open by appointment
located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee
★
Past Exhibitions
Learning From The Steep Slope, Installation view
Nearer Fuller, 2020, dye, bleach, acrylic, oil, natural pigment, linen, and pine, 54 x 38.5 in. (variable dimensions)
Early Landscape (II), 2020, oil, bleach, graphite, dye, linen, and pine, 54 x 40 in. (variable dimensions)
Two Dactyls, 2019, oil, acrylic, dye, sewn canvas, and pine, 21.5 x 16 in. (variable dimensions)
Tree House, After Bell, 2020, dye, bleach, oil, canvas, and pine, 54 x 40 in. (variable dimensions)
Antipode, 2020, oil, bleach, dye, canvas, and pine, 45 x 35 in (variable dimensions)
The Big Year, 2020, oil, dye, bleach, sewn canvas, pine, 19 x 15 in.Sincerely Yours, 2020, dye, bleach, linen, pine 12 x 9 in.
Flying by the seat of your pants is an idiom that comes from early days of aviation to describe flight when
instruments were not working, when weather interfered with visibility, when flying was less about mechanical
navigation aids and entirely dependent on navigating a plane guided by instinct. Eleanor’s paintings have less to do
with aviation, but everything to do with painting from experience, feeling, and intuition over a set in stone method.
It’s an ironic endeavor to talk about her work this way. For as many instinctual decisions made in the paintings there
is a lifetime of close looking, learning, of literature, of art, of archives. These paintings hold file folders worth of
information, yes, but to limit them to their cultural references would be to reduce them to their image, to history,
when they’re very much about processing material, understanding space, about learning as she goes. Flying by the
seat of your pants in an exercise in both learning and new ways of knowing.
Intuition is often referred to as “gut feeling” as it seems to arise fully formed form some deep part of us. Not magical, but rather a faculty in which hunches are generated by our mind sifting through past experience and cumulative knowledge. Materially, the paintings are light but they hold a weighty gut. I know this is something Eleanor thinks about. A Virgo, her bodily rule is over the digestive system. She writes in an email:
When I am painting now, I am always thinking of the relationship of oil paint, dye, bleach, and acrylic paint to weight, and the heaviness and lightness of objects, colors, materials. I have also incorporated some writing or notation of meter into the paintings, for example, the U / marks reference an iamb of poetic meter. So painting as a mark-making or sign-making exercise is, I think, related to writing and words and the construction of speech. When we talk about poetic meter we talk about stressed and unstressed syllables, which have a kind of “weight,” too. By extension this also involves the space between letters, the pause between speaking, the space in between the tree branches, the shapes created in the negative space of the stretcher bar designs. The collapse of the metaphor of weight with the real weight of stones and the displacement of natural objects is something I’m thinking about right now. Susan Howe writes about crossing the land bridge from Asia to the Americas: “in its first dumb form / language was gesture / technique of traveling over sea ice silent/ before great landscapes and glittering procession”
Eleanor Conover is an artist whose work engages with the physical and material conditions of painting as a metaphor for environmental time and space. Born in Hartford, CT in 1988, she received her MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2018) and her BA from Harvard College (2010). Most recently, her work has been shown at Ortega Y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY) and through the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME). Her work has been supported at artist residencies including Vermont Studio Center, Cow House Studios, and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center, and she is the recipient of the 2020 Alice C. Cole Fellowship at Wellesley College. She lives in Knoxville, TN, where she teaches Painting and Drawing at the University of Tennessee.
Intuition is often referred to as “gut feeling” as it seems to arise fully formed form some deep part of us. Not magical, but rather a faculty in which hunches are generated by our mind sifting through past experience and cumulative knowledge. Materially, the paintings are light but they hold a weighty gut. I know this is something Eleanor thinks about. A Virgo, her bodily rule is over the digestive system. She writes in an email:
When I am painting now, I am always thinking of the relationship of oil paint, dye, bleach, and acrylic paint to weight, and the heaviness and lightness of objects, colors, materials. I have also incorporated some writing or notation of meter into the paintings, for example, the U / marks reference an iamb of poetic meter. So painting as a mark-making or sign-making exercise is, I think, related to writing and words and the construction of speech. When we talk about poetic meter we talk about stressed and unstressed syllables, which have a kind of “weight,” too. By extension this also involves the space between letters, the pause between speaking, the space in between the tree branches, the shapes created in the negative space of the stretcher bar designs. The collapse of the metaphor of weight with the real weight of stones and the displacement of natural objects is something I’m thinking about right now. Susan Howe writes about crossing the land bridge from Asia to the Americas: “in its first dumb form / language was gesture / technique of traveling over sea ice silent/ before great landscapes and glittering procession”
Eleanor Conover is an artist whose work engages with the physical and material conditions of painting as a metaphor for environmental time and space. Born in Hartford, CT in 1988, she received her MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2018) and her BA from Harvard College (2010). Most recently, her work has been shown at Ortega Y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY) and through the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME). Her work has been supported at artist residencies including Vermont Studio Center, Cow House Studios, and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center, and she is the recipient of the 2020 Alice C. Cole Fellowship at Wellesley College. She lives in Knoxville, TN, where she teaches Painting and Drawing at the University of Tennessee.