VERY TENDER
July 24 - August 21, 2021
Open Saturdays 12-4pm and by appointment
Opening: July 24, 4-8pm

Melanie Bernier
Patrick Carroll
Josh Cloud
Lydia Kern
Sara Sutterlin
Nina Szenasi
Flora Wilds

It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender. —Jenny Holzer 

My internet spills over with aching handmade messages, from people I know and people I don’t. As the habitability of the world seems to just keep dwindling, cottage industries and #cottagecore thrive online, where grief, nostalgia, fantasy, art, and economic survival can now network with breathtaking ease. New architectures of validation come with new puzzles: how to define oneself, how to declare oneself an artist, how to declare oneself a real artist, how to find your way in, how to find your way out, how to show your face, how to craft your presence, how to make money without waking up and finding your soul is gone, and/or that it's been chopped up into irresistible little hors d'oeuvres. 

Quilting and Instagram both work in close relation to The Grid, and both are structures capable of accommodating great tenderness. Unlike fiber art and fashion, though, The Algorithm feels big, mathematical, and mean. We know it’s ultimately driven by greed (money, data, power), and we know it’s racist. And yet we keep logging on and keep sharing our feelings, keep proudly offering up images of our bodies and the things we make — sometimes for money, always for love. We marvel at each other’s softness and stitches and we sprinkle digital red hearts liberally. In spite (or because) of everything, we keep making and maintaining connections of care — learning about new artists, lifting up our friends and their work, sending reparations and mutual aid money to people we’ve never met in places we’ve never been. 

“The handmade” has so often been framed as a sweet and benign counter to the cold, hard, modern times. Sure, but craft is not a monolithic entity, and neither art nor survival are necessarily benign. Every work in this show is an expression from someone working with powerful forces of tenderness — not just in their self-interest, but in the interest of growing fuller spaces for experiencing love and rage, cultivating things we need for comfort and strength — fighting words, a warm blanket, a powerful garment.

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Melanie Bernier uses every creative tool possible to express the urgency of climate change - even the humiliating ones. These tools include acting, sewing, sweating, songwriting, activism, and writing. Underlying all her actions is a zero-waste ethos, a belief in the power of community, and a desire to transform harm into healing.

In her current series of hybrid quilted blankets x comic strips x masks, text is used to underscore the humor and tragedy, the horror and banality of life on an unraveling planet. Eyeholes invite us to embody a representation of the sky, a symbol of the living earth - and return to our place within it.

Current projects include Boston Cream, a disco punk band, and Trash is Tragic, a zero waste how-to column for Boston's independent culture paper, the Compass. Recent acting roles include Principal Victoria Johnson in Bri Moe Gee's dark comedy series No Joke, and the nonagenarian lead in Davey Strattan's play Transmitted from the Blue. Former projects include Punk Rock Aerobics, a punk workout class, and bands The Barbazons, The Fagettes, and The Electric Street Queens.

Recent solo exhibitions have gone up at the Museum of Arts and Design in NY, NY, Dirt Palace in Providence, RI, and Simmons University in Boston, MA. She's a graduate of Tyler School of Art at Temple University and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. While she currently lives and works in Philly, her heart remains in Boston. Please excuse the cliche. IG: @melsmoviemagic

Patrick Carroll is a writer and clothesmaker from California. IG: @patcar

Josh Cloud (b. San Diego, 1999) is a multimedia visual artist located in Los Angeles, CA. His practice entangles ceramics, fiber, wood, printmaking, and film, creating avenues through which to better describe and understand his personal intersectionality of black/mixed/queer identities through material metaphors. His work processes historical, generational, and personal traumas while simultaneously poking, prodigy and embracing the absurdity of life. Many of his works have an aged aesthetic quality, somewhere between art object and artifact, existing somewhen between times. These works hope to resurface and reanalyze the past––questioning which histories are inflated and which are compressed, who holds the power to make such decisions, and how that power can be claimed by an individual in the present through object making. IG: @boshyboi

Sara Sutterlin is the editor of LESTE and DOOF magazines. IG: @ssutln

Nina Szenasi is a cut and sew artist currently based in Montreal. She is constantly workshopping characters in her head that take shape in audio pieces that get uploaded to SoundCloud. Nina has recently begun taking clowning courses. She re-sells trash, cuts hair, and works with children. IG: @the.stoof

Lydia Kern is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Burlington,Vermont. Her work primarily consists of sculpture and installation, placing and stitching found objects and materials into new relationships with each other. These combinations create a weighty yet ephemeral material poetic, addressing themes of mending and memorialization. Her practice has led her to dumpsters, compost piles, thrift stores, free boxes, fabric stores, and florist shops, for the sake of creating spacious visual metaphors. Lydia has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Lab Program in Mexico City, the Generator, and New City Galerie. In her free time, Lydia enjoys pickling vegetables, roller skating, and bird watching. IG: @lydeia

Flora Wilds is a textile based artist working between New York and California. “My practice is committed to a collaboration with found materials, including previously worn clothing and other recycled textiles, often sourced from thrift stores, eBay, and my own archive. My sculpture, performance, and photo work is made from what is available and observable: objects that people have decided to part with, objects with histories, objects and sites that are reflections of cultural and societal values under capitalism. My practice employs the labor of looking, searching, curating, collecting, categorizing, shopping, waiting, checking, bargaining, budgeting, lugging, sewing, screen-shotting, researching, reading, writing, posting, crowd-sourcing, dialoguing, and constantly documenting. I am often thinking about the language that surrounds commodities, the labor and aesthetics of societally indoctrinated gender roles, the pop-cultural and material landscape of Southern California in the 2000s, social media and the acceleration of digital hauntology, conversations with and challenges to canonical art historical movements such as Minimalism, and the physical drama of capitalist realism via the theory of Mark Fisher.” IG: @abundant_commodities