Late Summer Exhibitions

Sunstroke | Denise Burge

We All Live Downwind | Shanna Merola

Bedside| Emily Orzech

August 23 – September 30, 2023

Buckham Gallery is pleased to present Late Summer Exhibitions with three concurrent solo exhibitions, featuring Denise Burge, Shanna Merola, and Emily Orzech.

Denise Burge | Sunstroke

Denise Burge’s work addresses how our ideas about certain places represent a sort of cultural fantasy, a romantic collage of impressions and desires which ossify into a psychological ‘space’ that in fact is no place at all. Currently, most interested in the element of the tropical as a representation of leisure, fecundity, nascent life and mortality she works in the fabric medium because of the theatrical nature of the painted quilt.  Until close inspection, the work often looks like it was painted—but much of it is pieced and embroidered.  Burge also loves the slowness of embroidery, which for her, evokes the narcotic effect that she wants the work to contain. The works on paper are often sketches or ‘rehearsals’ of approaches to the quilts.  Both employ a mixture of ‘high and low art’ surfaces and styles, referencing vernacular urban coastal culture.

Denise Burge received her MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University, and since has taught at the New York State College of Ceramics and the University of Cincinnati, where she is a Professor of Art.  She teaches courses that range from seminars on film theory to fiber art and animation.  In 2004 she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Visual Art. She has received multiple Ohio Arts Council Awards for Individual Artists and has been awarded competitive, funded residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito California, and the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.

Shanna Merola | We All Live Downwind

The images in We All Live Downwind are culled from daily headlines – inspired by global and grassroots struggles against the forces of privatization in the face of disaster capitalism. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes about the free market driven exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries saying, “the original disaster—the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane — puts the entire population into a state of collective shock”. The scenes in We All Live Downwind, have been carved out of dystopian landscapes in the aftermath of these events.

Shanna Merola is a visual artist, photojournalist, and legal worker. Her sculptural photo-collages are informed by the stories of environmental justice struggles past and present. Traveling to EPA designated Superfund sites, she has documented the slow violence of deregulation – from her own neighborhood on the Eastside of Detroit, to Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, and Love Canal, NY. Merola lives in Detroit, MI where she facilitates Know-Your-Rights workshops for grassroots organizations through the National Lawyers Guild.

Emily Orzech | Bedside

Bedside is made up of selected work from Emily Orzech series Family History, which was catalyzed by her late partner’s illness and experience navigating the healthcare system. Orzech is interested in the liminal spaces we inhabit in the process of illness and caregiving. Memory of this time is mutable, fabricated out of visual fragments and habitual gestures, like a muscle memory that lingers long after the events have passed. Using a process of layering upwards of thirty coats of screenprint on panel, sometimes adding graphite between the printed layers, Orzech selectively sands away the print, revealing the layers below. In this way she works using both additive and subtractive methods. The layering and sanding away of these images collapses the passage of time and mimics the simultaneous clarity and intangibility of these memories.

Emily Orzech is a printmaker who works in screenprint, relief, and mixed-media. She has attended residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, Kala, Zea Mays Printmaking, SPAR in Russia, and Spark Box Studios in Ontario, Canada, as well as a yearlong Fulbright in Lithography at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China. She is currently an Associate Professor and Department Chair at Muhlenberg College where she teaches printmaking.

Late Summer Exhibitions will be on view at Buckham Gallery from Wednesday, August 23 through Saturday, September 30. Flint’s ARTWALK will be held on Friday, September 9 from 6 to 9 PM. For more details, please visit www.buckhamgallery.org

Gallery Hours:

Wednesday  11 AM – 5 PM

Thursday & Friday 11 AM – 6 PM

Saturday  12 PM – 5 PM

Buckham Fine Arts Project is supported in part by an award from the MICHIGAN ARTS AND CULTURE COUNCIL and the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the Greater Flint Arts Council Share Art Genesee Grant Program made possible by the Genesee County Arts Education and Cultural Enrichment Millage funds. Your tax dollars are at work!