Featuring Artists

Cari Freno

Erik Adriel Peterson

Join us Thursday, June 9th from 6-9pm for the reception of Unsettled at AUTOMAT Collective, located within the Crane Arts building at 1400 N. American St. The show will be on view from June 4th - July 2nd, 2022 with viewing hours Saturdays 12-5pm.

“All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the landscape, is a ‘psychic state,’ and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy… If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears traces of his distress”

– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of Space

Featuring new works by Philadelphia-based artists Cari Freno and Erik Adriel Peterson, Unsettled explores haunted spaces: the alternate psychic and imaginal realities created by trauma, unease, repression, or illness in the home. Delving into familial histories, memories, and dreamscapes, Freno and Peterson mine uncanny imagery from the oneiric house. Whether assembling household materials into disturbing masks and models or drawing and erasing a family portrait over the course of a decade, Freno’s material manifestations of terror and anxiety draw upon the cognitive dissonance of childhood. Peterson, a tarot reader and magical practitioner, recreates the energy of lucid dreams, early rooms, past-life recollections, and their suburban upbringing in unreliable ways; imbuing memory with fantasy and treading the threshold between the ordinary and the unreal. Whether depicting subjects eerily absent or strangely present, the works in Unsettled invites us to question the thought forms we generate when we lack comfort and security, and the specters which remain under our skin.