April 20 - June 3, 2023
Francis Beaty
Patti Dougherty
Karen Hunter McLaughlin
Christy E. O'Connor
Mary Powers Holt
Michele Randall
Amy Sarner Williams
Kathran Siegel
Kimberly Stemler
Barbara Straussberg
Jeremy Waak
Major funding for InLiquid Gallery programming has been provided by PNC Arts Alive and the Penn Treaty Special Services District.
Additional support comes from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Friends of InLiquid, and generous donors like you. Thank you!
Gallery 108
1400 N. American Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122
InLiquid.org
Open Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6 PM & by appointment
For inquiries and appointments, contact (215) 235-3405.
Following page: Exhibition view, InLiquid Gallery
(left to right)
Curtain Call
Kathran Siegel
33 x 29"
Linden wood, acrylic painted areas
Woods Destruction for Development
Mary Powers Holt
40 x 36"
Acrylic paint on canvas, framed
(top to bottom)
Fields II
11.5 x 14.5"
Waves II
12 x 15"
Fields I
11.5 x 14.5"
All: Amy Sarner Williams
Birch bark collage on wood panel, handmade oak frame
Light Through the Forest
Karen Hunter McLaughlin
18 x 12"
Monotype print, with rust & metal-leaf on Japanese paper
From appreciating, investigating, and collaborating to adulterating, manipulating, and exploiting, how do humans cultivate and change nature, and what will that mean for our future? The eleven artists in Crafting Nature explore how humans interact with nature in their work.
The artists in Crafting Nature all depict the various ways humans interact with the natural world, whether collaborating, admiring, and pondering, or designing, shaping, and constraining nature. The artists ask us, what is our impact on the earth? Or perhaps more significantly, how does the earth shape and change our own permeable selves?
Barbara Straussberg, Christy E. O’Connor, Michele Randall, and Francis Beaty all collaborate with nature as an artistic aide in their process. Straussberg and Beaty use natural materials to create pieces that appear or are deconstructed, and mirror nature’s recurring cycle of growth and decay.
O’Connor and Randall use nature as raw material in their work–O’Connor uses fragments of nature’s bones, flowers, and chrysalis remnants in her feminine inspired sculptures, and Randall uses the sun as a developer for her floral inspired prints.
(left to right)
Acorpora I
Acorpora II
Patti Dougherty
All: 11 x 15"
Acrylic on paper
Joomchi/Corset One
Barbara Straussberg
19 x 17"
Handmade paper (Hanji), acrylic, monotype, paper lithograph print and dried hydrangea
Joomchi/Corset Four
Barbara Straussberg
19 x 13"
Handmade paper (Hanji), acrylic, monotype, paper lithograph print and dried hydrangea
Karen Hunter McLaughlin and Patti Dougherty both create representations of nature that demonstrate a deep admiration for the scientific composition and symbolically impactful physicality found within nature. Hunter McLaughlin celebrates the symbiotic relationship between plant and fungi, while Dougherty studies universal forms as a symbol for the passage of time, at once both animating birth and decay.
Amy Sarner Williams, Jeremy Waak, and Kathran Siegal use various human-made tools to recreate, reference, and interact with nature. Sarner Williams and Siegal cut and carve various wood materials to create abstract representations of nature. Waak’s love for machinery and nature is melded into a fictitious agave flower and machine hybrid.
Kimberly Stemler
24 x 24"
Oil on canvas with block print
golden fields
Kimberly Stemler
24 x 36"
Oil on canvas with block print
Jake and His Tractor
Mary Powers Holt
30 x 40"
Acrylic on canvas, framed
Mary Powers Holt and Kimberly Stemler produce paintings that evoke memoria tied to a specific natural place, and compare humans' effect on nature with nature’s effect on humans. Powers Holt captures her own memory of a land being developed, while Stemler creates a placeless sense of recollection and nostalgia of nature.
Second Thursday at the Crane Arts building is an event any art lover in Philly doesn’t want to miss— the InLiquid Gallery, held its opening for the exhibition, Crafting Nature. Viewers were clearly taken by the show, and at one point a small crowd formed around Jeremy Waak’s sculpture AGVC2v2. Crafting Nature is simultaneously a utopian
and realist vision of humans' relationship with nature. Artists look at this tension, from collaboration and celebration, to acquisition and exploitation. Some artists engage with nature as a medium, while others playfully reimagine nature’s configurations and organisms. As climate change becomes more prevalent and all encompassing, the eleven artists in Crafting Nature urge viewers to envision ways forward while also reflecting on humans' cultivation of nature and its role in the arts.
Kimberly Stemler creates nostalgic oil paintings as she shows nature as fragments in memories; there is a sense of
Opposite page:
meet me at the edge of the sky
Kimberly Stemler
12 x 9"
Oil on canvas with block print
Exhibition View, InLiquid Gallery: AGVC2v2
Jeremy Waak
24 x 12 x 12"
Stainless steel and brass
timelessness and recollection that appears in her pieces. It is a symbiosis between memory and nature, as if nature both prompts memory and preserves it. Golden Fields is a large oil painting midway through the show: it features a field set in dusk light, the sun nowhere to be seen but unmistakably about to set. The brush strokes seamlessly bleed into one another, giving the illusion of a hazily faded memory. It is this melding of memory and nature that creates a synergetic relationship
between viewer, painter, and the natural world. There are symbiotic relationships within nature that can inspire new connections and understanding.
Karen Hunter McLaughlin showcases mycorrhizal networks, examining the symbiotic transferences between plant and fungi to better understand how they share, connect, and rescue each other. In Macrocosm, an interference watercolor painting, there are colorful pathways that could represent mycelium, neural
pathways, or the cosmos. These rhizomatic pathways often show in her work, as seen in Symbiotic Colony and Light Through the Forest. Hunter McLaughlin showcases these universal patterns found in nature’s physiology, highlighting the repetition of symbiosis seen in vital natural forms.
What can symbiosis look like between nature and artist?
For Michele Randall, the sun is a vital player in the creation of her cyanotypes. In cyanotypes, the sun or UV rays acts as the developer for
the photograph, producing beautiful shades of indigo. In Propagated Beauty, three young women in swimsuits hold hands as flowers arch before them. There is a stillness and nostalgia, evoking the feeling one gets when ruminating over a forgotten but found photograph. Randall uses cyanotype as a form of collaboration between nature and artist, synthesizing nature and chemistry, a process that recalls how flowers photosynthesize. It is these collective processes and representations that
prompt the viewer to ponder creative ways we might collaborate with nature, even in the age of technology and globalized industrialization.
The artists of Crafting Nature do not all represent the celebratory curation of nature’s reciprocity, but rather illustrate humans' destructive exploitation of natural resources for capitalistic pursuits. Mary Powers Holt paints from memories of visiting a generational farm, where surrounding farmlands and woods were being developed. Her paintings demonstrate a sharp contrast and tension
between land development and farming; in Woods Destruction for Development, the acrylic painting shows deforestation while a lone
dog roams. Remnants of the developers and loggers are present: piles of gravel lie in the background, as orange safety netting and cut trees rest in the foreground. Powers Holt shows the devastating effect capitalism holds on nature, a sharp contrast to the paintings of generational farmers working their crops and land. Deforestation is an active part of the climate crisis, and Powers Holt reminds us that
our forests are as vulnerable as the Amazon. Many of the artists use natural materials in their pieces as raw material rather than representation, celebrating nature’s organic beauty and demonstrating nature’s ability to partake in the creative process. Francis Beaty creates minimalist compositions from found materials of nature, as assemblages of natural decay. In Silver Dollar Relic, the lunaria pods are clustered together in an amorphous shape like a cloud, with black
seeds frozen in free fall. In all four of Beaty’s images in Crafting Nature, the actual natural remnants are highlighted against a bare white background. Beaty uses these natural materials as collage into something abstract and deconstructed.
Christy E. O’Connor showcases found natural material in a more maximalist approach; she creates time capsules made from cigar boxes and organic fragments, such as chrysalises, flowers, and bones. O’Connor
transforms these memento boxes into abstract depictions of women’s archetypes, perceptions, and values. Memento 1 is a cigar box propped open with a small part of an animal’s jaw bone, dried moss at the edges, a paper wheel tied by a string hanging, a rusted nail tucked in. There is something whimsical and fantastical about the memento boxes; the raw materials showcase human intervention and cultivation of natural resources.
Found resources provide opportunity for interposition and transformation, as seen by Amy Sarner Williams’ work. She manipulates birch bark cultivated from her property in Maine beyond their natural state, and into tonal hues that comprise landscape images. Wave
II is a collage of birch bark transformed into curvatures of the waves that almost seem to contradict the
bark material. The precision with which each shape is cut shows Sarner Williams' expertise, and the result has an overture of something identifiable and familiar, yet fresh and original. Crafting Nature’s use of raw materials highlights the potential nature has to assist and manifest in art, and also challenges the concept that nature must resign to simply artistic inspiration.
The artists in Crafting Nature reimagine representations of nature into otherworldly science fiction; Kathran
Siegel, for instance, creates painted wooden sculptures that reference plants and sea creatures, shaped into something almost alien. Remnants of Last Spring is a wooden sculpture of a pillar with
a wooden flower almost precariously balancing on top. Pods of this flower lie in the divet center of the body of the pillar; while this flower and pillar are recognizable in Remnants of Last Spring, other bodies such as Curtain Call remain unnameable and unrecognizable. Siegel transforms these blocks of
wood into organisms that render the imagination.
Patti Dougherty experiments with the concept of a basic living organism, looking at universal forms such as nests, eggs, and one celled organisms—forms that represent continuous cycles of time, demonstrating both
In Acropora 2 jellyfish-like creatures cluster in the acrylic painting against a dark red-clay background,
the same color that is the underbelly of the small creatures. Organized diagonally, the creatures seem almost animated, as if swimming through the red paint. Other creatures, such as Rough Cactus Coral 3 and Rough Cactus Coral 4, resemble caterpillars or parasitic worms; all of these creatures are a colorful cast in a familiar but new world that Dougherty has created for the viewer.
(top to bottom)
Rough Cactus Coral 3
Rough Cactus Coral 4
Patti Dougherty
All: 10 x 10"
Acrylic on paper
Jeremy Waak has always been fascinated with nature and industrial mechanism, and in Crafting Nature his two pieces Willow Oak Maquette and AGVC2v2 come to life in science fictional plant/ machine hybrids. The perched sculpture, AGVC2v2, is made of stainless steel and brass wire frame – a synthetic creature of agave flower and industrial origin. These hybrid models of man-made nature serve as an idea of futurity during globalized
industrialization. The artists who reimagine fantastical versions of nature in Crafting Nature provide a commentary on futurity and the creativity needed to combat climate change. They trade in ideas of technology enabling nature’s growth, evolutions yet to take place, and replace standards of how nature influences art.
Through reflections of symbiosis and exploitation, and reimaginations of the configurations of nature and the possibility of raw materials, Crafting Nature presents a diverse array of art. With climate change looming as an irrefutable future, the artists in Crafting Nature provide insight, curiosity, and an exposition on man’s impact on the environment. The exhibition offers new perspectives on the current crisis, and ideas on how to change our relationship to nature to move forward. There
is an urgency in Crafting Nature: we must reexamine our relationship to nature, reenvision the way it shapes us, and reinvent paths forward. Futurity depends on the present. •
Maxwell is a writer, editor, and Public Library Assistant living in Philadelphia. They are currently the editor-inchief of tk.collective. Their focus is on art critique and queer culture, and they write poetry, personal essays and other creative nonfiction. As an artist in their free time, they also practice photography, printmaking, and screen printing.
Christy E. O’Connor is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in the New York metro area. She combines wearable sculpture, performance, and 2D mixed media works to create narrative bodies of work and installations.
Memento 2
9 x 14"
Cigar box, collage, found objects, chrysalis, clay figure
Memento 1
13 x 9"
Cigar box, collage, found objects, animal jawbone
Francis Beaty is a contemporary installation artist, painter and sculptor known for her interdisciplinary work and introspective style. Her works incorporate found and constructed elements with a unique conceptual inventiveness. Her first large installation “The Hatching” was a community engagement piece in Allentown, PA (2017). Her membership in the Global Art Project (2018-2021) expanded her exhibition opportunities into Europe. She participated in the Geuzenmaand (20212022) Exhibition, which traveled to the Museum Vlaardingen, World Art Delft, Rotterdam Courthouse and Kunstwerkt Foundation Scheidam. She was awarded the Betsy Meyer Award in Philadelphia in 2021 and is a member of InLiquid and CFEVA. Her residencies include Saruya, Japan; Buffalo Creek, Nevada; Chateau Campadieu, France; Baum School of Art, PA. Francis has utilized her degrees in Education, French and Architectural Interior Design to express herself.
Pod Flotilla
13 x 13"
3 bottle tree seed pods immersed in paste medium on Khadi paper
Arbor Pulse
24 x 24"
Mixed media
Barbara Straussberg is an abstract painter and paper artist working in Philadelphia. Her process is material based and explores the intersection of ancient Korean paper art with contemporary abstract painting. Her studio practice encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking, paper sculpture and collage.
Straussberg’s recent solo exhibitions include: Paper Revealed, Gravers Lane Gallery, Philadelphia (2022); URBN Headquarters, Naval Yard, Philadelphia (2020) and Allen’s Lane Art Center, Philadelphia (2020). Select group exhibitions include: Looks Good on Paper, National Juried Exhibition of Works on and of Paper, Pyramid Atlantic, MD; Une Exposition d’arts Obessionels de la Fibre, Gravers Lane Gallery, Philadelphia (2019); Contemporary Craft, Delaware Art Museum (2018) and Gawanghwamoon International Art Fair (GIAF), Seoul, Korea (2011). Her works are held in private, museum and corporate collections including Biggs Museum of American Art, SAP America, Fox Rothschild and Brandywine Realty Company (Lobby). She was awarded a Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Merit Grant Residency at the Vermont Studio Center.
Straussberg received a Bachelor of Arts degree with Distinction in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, and Certificate in painting and printmaking at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
(Detail) Joomchi/Prints to Pleats IKaren Hunter McLaughlin is a lifelong Philadelphia artist who has worked in traditional 2-D mediums as well as steel wire sculpture. She is currently exploring the fine art of monotype, the spontaneous yet corrosive properties of rust, and animated augmented reality. Karen's work is often developed across a surface in cascading or ascending layers. Current themes are a congruence of multilayer prints creating 2-D inhabitable virtual-vistas supported with an additional layer of augmented reality freeing the work from the confines of two dimensions.
Hunter McLaughlin has exhibited throughout the United States. Her work is held in many private collections as well a permanent collections at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery, East Norriton, PA, and Mission First Projects at Union Eagle Apartments in Bordentown New Jersey, and MBP Apartments in Philadelphia, PA. Hunter McLaughlin's art has been included in publications including Philadelphia Stories and Extraordinary Gifts, Remarkable Women of the Delaware Valley.
Hunter McLaughlin is the founder and director of KM Digital Design.
Chromesthesia II 30 x 22"
"I love color and paint and surface. I work primarily in wood. My process is to build and to carve out my compositional spaces first, and later to respond with paint. The process of working out visual ideas in series becomes a selfgenerating engine. I have yet to feel that I have exhausted an idea. At some point I move on, inventing a new vocabulary of forms, shapes, surface treatment, use, materials, reference, or any or all of these.
My process flows most freely when I keep my work somewhere within the bounds of abstraction. Referencing, though never engaging representation to the point of realism, my work over the years has been interpretive to varying degrees. I like to search out relationships between the natural world and a more personal world of human experience. Often considering the wall as my compositional space, a portion of my work speaks as installation, spanning large spaces when these are available."
Jeremy Waak was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska. At an early age, he began to pursue creative endeavors, such as drawing and painting, which have remained integral activities for him. Being the child of a mechanic, Waak was heavily influenced by cars, engines, and all things mechanical.
Waak attended the Memphis College of Art as an undergraduate and majored in metalsmithing. In Memphis, he began to explore the design and creation of mechanisms, which spawned the first in a series of handheld devices called the "One Kernel Popcorn Popper." These disarmingly funny objects have allowed him to explore his love of the mechanical while making social commentary about our relationship to gadgets, planned obsolescence, absurdity, and Americana.
Waak continued to hone this body of work as a graduate student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His work in graduate school culminated in a thesis show titled,"One Kernel Popcorn Popper". This work earned him an Illinois Arts Council Grantin 2002. In 2010, he began a ten-year project converting an 19th century warehouse and blacksmith’s shop into a home and studio.After sixteen years in higher education, Associate Professor at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, Waak is now a full-time studio artist. His current interest is in exploring new work involving industrial imagery/mechanisms hybridized with plant/animal subject matter. His studio practice includes functional objects, wearable artwork and jewelry, gallery installations and public artworks.
Kimberly Stemler was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pa, and received a BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Living with her husband Jon and their three boys in a rural area of Montgomery County, she is inspired by the land. Her work primarily revolves around landscapes that are densely patterned, layered and focused on color. These landscapes, while abstracted, have the ability to give the viewer a sense of connection to place, time, moment. They can feel nostalgic and almost recognizable, like a fuzzy memory. Another focus of her work tends to revolve around objects that are evocative, wistful, and full of remembrance.
Stemler is the recipient of Best Abstract Award from the Philadelphia Sketch Club's "Absolutely Abstract" group show and the Member Award from the "Small Works" show located at Studio B in Boyertown. Recent juried shows include New Hope Arts “Ancestral Intersection”, the Montgomery County Studio Tour and solo shows at the Abington Art Center and Cairn University.
"I am a professional artist, living and working in Philadelphia PA. I spent almost my entire career in the field of ceramic art–teaching, creating and exhibiting.
[ . . . ] I have always been drawn to the use of natural materials in my artistic practice. While quarantining at my family's cabin in the mountains of western Maine in 2020, without access to clay and kilns, I began a new phase of artistic exploration. My new works are collages created with birch bark found on our property and on walks in the idyllic Maine woods. The quality of birch bark has always intrigued me, with its myriad peelable layers unveiling a hidden array of colors, textures and patterns. I collect the bark (from the ground, not from live trees) and prepare it through a lengthy process of soaking, peeling into layers, flattening, and cutting. This new body of work builds on my earlier clay work, inspired by the splendor of the natural world. The bark of the birch tree enables me to create collages of mystical and enchanting beauty, capturing the spirit of the ever-changing landscape. Recently, I have expanded the scope of this work into more abstract compositions. These new works play with depth and space, color and texture. They are environments to explore, passageways to enter, mazes to lose oneself in."
Mary Powers Holt exhibits her work with the Cerulean Arts Collective Members Gallery in Philadelphia and has participated in past exhibits with the Jeffrey Leder Gallery formerly in Long Island City, NY. Her work has been shown in the Alumni Gallery of the PA Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, The Main Line Art Center in Haverford, PA, Solo at The Rivers Edge Gallerysponsored by Inliquid at Bridgeton House, the Maryland Federation of Art in Annapolis, Maryland and in many other venues. Her work is in many private collections.
Powers Holt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She studied painting, drawing and Sculpture at the PA Academy of the Fine Arts and Art History at the University of Pennsylvania through the Academy and Penn’s coordinated B.F.A./Certificate program. She also studied foundation design at the University of the Arts. As a student at the PA Academy she was awarded the J. Henry Schiedt Traveling Scholarship for work exhibited in the Student Annual.
Michele Randall is a visual artist and instructor. Her abstract and narrative work utilizes a range of mediums focusing on more traditional and process heavy techniques. She earned an MFA in printmaking at Penn State University. Her university teaching experience includes printmaking, foundations in drawing and foundations in painting. Currently she conducts group workshops and individual instruction in encaustic and cyanotype printmaking across the United States. She is represented by the Roaring Artist Gallery and shows her work regularly in brick-and-mortar and virtual locations.
"In my years as a visual artist I have chosen symbolic forms that are both universal and personal to express the idea of “time.” Often I use nests, eggs, marine creatures, and one-celled organisms. They are symbols for natural phenomenas that manifest this notion of time. I have reinterpreted these forms in states of birth and decay, remnants of our primeval past and our endangered future. My visual vocabulary is derived from many sources, some are apparent, some are obscure. Most are abstractions to allow the viewer to ponder the creatures and events or the possible patterns they embody.
[ . . .
] Currently, many of the subjects of my work, both in painting and in glass, reside in Bonaire about ten feet under the Caribbean Sea. I have been a volunteer 'reef surveyor' for Sea Turtle Conservation Bonaire (bonaireturtles.org).
During this scientific study I am a 'spotter' of sea turtles and a variety of marine creatures. This allows me to gather mental images and ponder the many species of coral that exist in the underwater world, noting both their abundance and condition. It allows me to focus on threatened or endangered species. After seeing a specific sea creature, I do a painting from memory. In this way, I can carefully examine a specimen taking note of its habitat and the environmental challenges it faces. [
Through my art, I visually capture an iconic creature engage viewers and remind them of our fragile marine environment."
InLiquid is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to creating opportunities and exposure for visual artists and works with more than 300 artists and designers. It serves as a free, online public hub for arts information in the Philadelphia area. Find out more at www.inliquid.org.
All rotational artworks are available for purchase. Inquiries for purchases can be directed to Clare Finin at clare@inliquid.org.
Following page: Exhibition view, InLiquid Gallery
