Opening reception takes place November 20, 2025 from 5-7 PM at Beeler Gallery.
This exhibition brings together three solo shows and one large-scale collaboration. Each contains an inherent conflict, though the nature of these conflicts varies greatly across the four rooms.
Jimmy Baker – Glancing, Gutted
Glancing, Gutted presents six new oil paintings arranged in pairings across the gallery. Each pairing features chroma-drenched, collage-based works that invert and clash charged imagery of performative media violence that speaks less to specific moments of unrest than to the commerce of ideological framing and spectacle. The paintings depict both left- and right-coded bodily bindings (harnesses and tactical vests) rendered in thick black oils with squeegee pulls or impasto brushwork. These forms intertwine with central abstract shapes that hold fragmented renderings of bodies in space, figures that resist the literal scale and proportion of their bindings.
In an era of algorithmic loops, rage-bait, and bot farms, I paint scenes of confrontation and division, using visual pleasure to draw viewers into a deeper encounter with the very forces they might prefer to avoid. This work is not about moral didacticism or outrage, but about our collective proximity to power. What shifts is who wears it, who wields it, and who is bound by it. In the end, the reversals all point to a single condition: that we are trapped in a loop, and perhaps the only way out is to stop looking through the frame and start looking at it.
Laura Sanders – Survivor Skills
Laura Sanders’ paintings consider the complexities of what appears to be a simple act, spending time alone in nature. As a survivor of sexual assault, a reality shared by many, she reflects on the constant calculations women and girls are forced to make each day. Vigilance intrudes on solitude, turning a routine walk into an anxious yet bold act.
In dialogue with ecofeminist traditions, Sanders draws parallels between the threats women face and the violence inflicted on the environment. Visual metaphors of this reciprocal relationship emerge in the way light transforms as it passes through the landscape, revealing evidence of the surroundings when it strikes the figure. While women are often depicted in idyllic natural scenes, Sanders challenges these conventions, rejecting the cliché that equates feminine beauty with nature and suggesting instead that women’s destructive instincts are no less potent than men’s. Her paintings articulate these fears and longings with an expressive brush that puts forefront the tactile and luscious material qualities of oil paint. The robust use of paint creates an almost photorealistic image that, when viewed in person, reveals its construction, inviting viewers to slow down and experience the physical evidence of the hand inthe haptic marks of the paint.
Sarah Fairchild – The Gilded Wild
At an early age I was exposed to contrasts in décor: my aunt’s chic 1970s home, decorated in velvets, metallic wallpapers, chrome, and shag carpet which stood in sharp contrast to my mother’s restrained formula of muted floral wallpaper with a matching valance and pillow. Those interiors shaped my eye for ornament, surface, and excess and span the breadth of my work. My Flower Remedy paintings revisit that history, blending pattern with imperfection and choice, allowing the paintings to almost merge with their surroundings. In this, I take what I inherited, resist control, and claim ornament as a choice, a personal language, and an act of resistance.
My work explores the connection between nature and artifice, between interior and exterior. I render botanical and animal forms in heightened color and intricate detail—recognizable but never exact—interpretations shaped by memory and touch. These pieces gleam with metallic surfaces and bright, unexpected colors, not necessarily found in nature: pink snakes, gold or black velvet leaves, electric blues. While the result might seem whimsical or innocuous, something darker lies beneath. Sometimes it’s literal trash: discarded plastic packaging embedded under gilded petals or wings.
