Curatorial Statement:

From our deep familiarity with nature’s forms and patterns we carry hardwired instincts and predilections into everything we encounter. While the symmetry of a leaf or a face is intrinsically comforting, a field of view in which trees extend in perfect symmetry—as if unfolding all around us—would startle and confound. In infinitesimal moments, we pick up on cues in our environment that tell us something has happened here. Or something is about to happen.

Through the sculptural work of Megan Feniak, Rah Gerg, Lauren Pakradooni, and Rochelle Voyles, A Tactile Warning unfolds around us. A carved effigy of the face-like pattern on a trapdoor spider, scaled forty times in size, looms on the wall. A tiered structure adorns itself in the mirrored shapes of bats and insect wings. Branches shift their appearance to resemble antlers shedding their velvet. A serpentine form unfurls in perfect four-quadrant symmetry.

Each artist in A Tactile Warning reveals a process that comes alive in repetition and accumulation. Practices in printmaking, papermaking, casting, and collage serve as foundational mechanisms by which the artists turn recurring elements into new configurations. Their work expresses a reiterative, transformative power that speaks to larger themes of adaptation, coexistence, and relational narratives. In it, we see familiar gestures articulated within emergent bodies.

A Tactile Warning leads us to a landscape overwrought with indelible ripeness: Forms and patterns so deeply layered they become their own entities. Symbols that seem to circulate within themselves, reconciling tensions. The cropping up of strange growth—newly born, but long becoming.