Bodies Within - Hannah Buss, Joleanna Bare, Elaff Houmsse, and Reagan Joseph
Bodies Within celebrates and recognizes how we are in spaces. A collaborative show between Hannah Buss, Joleanna Bare, Elaff Houmsse, and Reagan Joseph invites you to view different areas and ideas of introspection and perception of the world we are in and how the world affects us.
Hannah Buss and Elaff Houmsse’s collaborative pieces from Excuse Us explores what it is to make art together and have a relationship through that making. Centering on the idea that art is not a passive object but an active participant in dialogue with its audiences. Through the form of a playground, the show highlights how art can serve as both a space for individual expression and a platform for shared experiences. A diverse materiality plays a significant role throughout this exhibition. The work employs metals, fibers, and glass to create a material dialogue. Fibers, with their softness and flexibility, contrast with the rigid, structured forms of metal, mirroring the nuanced and sometimes contradictory nature of artistic dialogue. These materials have been carefully considered, explored, and manipulated to highlight narratives of both difference, coexistence and how this results in a space of play. Glass elements introduce a layer of distortion and reflection, further emphasizing the complexity of perception
Joleanna Bare creates artwork that carries a social narrative and evokes an emotional response in its viewers. That emotional response catches interest and most importantly gives the messages behind the work a chance to be heard. Prominent themes of her works are diversity, public health, awareness of issues within our community, environmental conservation, and the connections formed between humans and themselves, their environment, and other living things. These themes weave throughout her practice building illustrations and stories towards a composed visual piece of art that beckons closer inspection and has been said creates a relationship between the viewer and the art itself. She works mostly in varieties of paint as a chosen medium and most recently creating interactive mural experiences. Other similarities notable in her paintings are the dramatic use of lights and shadows and detailed portraiture.
Reagan Joseph has spent the past two years creating series of drawings, paintings and writing, and is a dissection of the definition and achievability of autonomy. The body of work repeatedly reimagines these concerns through symbolic metaphor in a feminine perspective. In a visual comparison of fish and cigarettes, these pieces, when examined together, examine how we define and explore the limits of our own freedom and how mourning its absence often manifests in the habits adopted in defense. The basis of the examination is rooted in irony, with the idea of almost enigmatic creatures who exist freely above depths unknown becoming captured or harvested, compartmentalized and labeled for consumption, packed tightly in aluminum cans. The juxtaposition of the cigarettes provides an opposite end to this paradox, visually comparable in their bright boxes, culturally representing choice and freedom that is just as similarly sold on shelves. Yet in this context, they invoke the idea of regaining control of both time and body, despite the harm they carry. Simultaneously these subjects narrate an analysis of the idea of an autonomous woman within what is feared, what is law, what is desired, what is expected, but most crucially: what is consumable.
