MassArt x SoWa

“Our »Becoming« is a porous endeavor, an entangled world of (un)foreseen flows. It is in the wisdom of caring, in acts of mindfulness, and in careful consideration of the discordance of disturbed stories, that we may encounter our best optimisms for precarious and perilous survival.” – Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

These seven artists featured in Porous Interiorities explore the permeable boundaries between inner and outer world-making. How do the unseen but felt forces that surround us, inform and make us in return? Porousness here also becomes a kind of portal of access into psychological, emotional, and conceptual realms that express themselves through varied outgrowths of form and material experimentation, which further take on their own energetic lives and visual languages. 

Lauren Comerato invites viewers into domestic spaces shaped by familial memory and domestic labor. On one side of a new walled installation, a projection of the artist’s family photo album is projected as a ghostly apparition that appears through an otherwise voided frame. Multiple frames here surrounded by ornate build-ups of silicone caulking and wallpaper gesture at the presence and absence of personal histories of care that make a home. On the “inner” side and rather than an insidious specter, industrial materials such as wiring, cables, work tools, wooden beams, and caulking are exposed to remind of the layers of intergenerational resilience and handiwork that bolster our more visible surroundings. 

Michele Cook explores ideas about reading, linguistics, and found sign systems and how they influence our perception of the world around us, where meaning originates – particularly around binaries of “nature” and “nurture” – and how such meaning-making is recorded. As the artist notes, “I play with ideas of books and book art, trees that signal, and rocks that hold histories.” The artist utilizes printmaking techniques such as wood cut relief and collagraph prints made using collaged textures such as paper and tape that further become stenciled elements or letterpress type in editioned prints. On view alongside three larger-scale works, are two handmade books, both unique and small editions, that feature printed imagery, collage compositions, text, and poetry.

Kathleen Quigley examines abject emotions through the body as a site that simultaneously creates and expels the horrors of the primal physicality of being. Quigley’s video work on view in this exhibition Ocean (2025), is a direct response to the unresolvable experiences of loss, depicting the artist viscerally and continuously submerging and surfacing amongst the breaking of waves. Through the embodied act of enduring the ocean’s force, the artist’s own body archives memories of pain and grief suspended, as the artist writes “in the absence of death, presence without connection, and change without ritual.” These performances thus hold space for loss and finding everyday meaning in cyclical experiences of suffering and rebirth.

Shan Ross creates ceramics through traditional pottery techniques, including marbling, raku, and kintsugi that blend layers, crack clay, and damage surfaces. Ross has also maintained an ongoing bartering project of creating an endless supply of small vessels, where the artist also interweaves a relational ethos of trade and gifting, by which they trade their ceramics for stories. On view in this exhibition specifically are two ceramic assemblages that reflect the wider formal nature of their practice, from 3D mapping projections and sounds of surf, sand, and moss onto broken ceramic surfaces, to vessels that also seem to emanate light from within. 

Kathleen Schroeder most recent materially-layered processes involve printing unrefined, utilitarian fibers –  such as burlap and jute meshes – onto papers such as kozo and xuan, using a monotype printmaking method. The alchemy of ink on natural fibers results in various visual formations that accentuate the very structural densities inherent to the paper, which become cloth-like in their materiality. The artist’s recent work that hand-stiches these prints together into larger compositions whereby layers hover and absorb light while casting shadow, further visually connecting the printed fibers and their shared foundations.

Deborah Way creates soft sculptures that play on uncanny tensions between what the artist calls “perceptions of our civilized, outer selves present to the world while our inner selves roil messily beneath.” Sewing each element from nostalgic patterned fabrics, such as a protruding leg or bulbous extrusions, each work conjures the artist’s own references to familial figures. Wire and plastic fencing elements further represent cages or even protective boundaries, which evoke dark humor, theatricality, as well as a lingering softness and element of play that backgrounds each material composition. 

Gail Winbury creates abstract paintings that reflect on the nonverbal, personal experiences informed by her training as a psychologist. While the artist’s previous works have addressed gender, mortality and childhood memory, her current compositions explore uncertainty – including with her practice as an abstract painter – at the intersections of aging, embodiment, and gender. As the artist writes herself, “we are amalgams of our history, and my art embodies years of living.” In this series of newer works, exuberant build-ups of colors and the materiality of oil paint express also new beginnings and worlds possible in the unpredictable unfolding of time. 

-Danni Shen, July 2025