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Whitespace Summer Exhibitions (fridays)
CL RECOMMENDS
Sat., Jun. 7 - Sat., Jul. 19
CRITIC’S PICK:
Melissa Huang: No Doll, Whitespace Gallery: Melissa Huang is an interdisciplinary artist who teaches art at Georgia Southern University. She graduated from Georgia State University with her MFA in Drawing and Painting (2021) and the Rochester Institute of Technology with her BFA in Fine Arts Studio (2014). Huang calls her work “glitch-inspired painting” in which she studies the desire, failure, and dissonance of portraying an idealized self for a real and digital audience. She adds, “Adopting a perfect girl persona has never been easier; however, the physical and emotional roles that society expects women to fulfill have never been further out of reach.”
Also showing at the gallery is The Hunt by Hanna Newman. The show is described as a sculptural installation that explores the complexity of the self and the inner dualities of the psyche. Newman says her work involves a diverse range of materials such as ceramics, metal, resin, wood, found objects, and video. “I am drawn to moments of transition, to the in-between - the spaces where boundaries blur and certainty fades.” — Kevin C. Madigan
From the venue:
No Doll by Melissa Huangby
No Doll considers the dollhouse as both a symbol of domesticity and site of fragmented identity. Through painting, video, and sculpture, this exhibition studies and deconstructs the archetypes that constrain us.
As a child, strangers would tell my parents, “She looks just like a little China Doll”. This suggested an identity that was delicate, ornamental, and distant from my growing understanding of the self. It felt constricting, being perceived in a way that didn’t align with who I was. In an encounter with a woman at the grocery store, I surprised her and my mother by assertively stating, “No Doll!” in response to her comment.
The dollhouse becomes a space for confinement and transformation. These miniaturized domestic spaces mirror the constraints of traditional femininity, where every detail is controlled, manipulated, and perfected. Hyper-saturated figures in my work are incomplete, distorted, and layered reflecting tension within the self.
No Doll reimagines the doll as a metaphor for reclaiming agency. This body of work invites viewers to interrogate expectations that shape personal and collective selfhood, ultimately questioning the way identity is defined and represented.
The Hunt by Hanna Newman
“As the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them connect in one triangle momentarily. The connection is eros.” -Anne Carson
THE HUNT is a sculptural installation that explores the complexity of the self. It explores the inner dualities of the psyche: ego and shadow, control and surrender, fragmentation and wholeness. Drawing from mythology, archetypal imagery, and personal memory, THE HUNT is a symbolic space where the desire for discovery meets the resistance of the known. In a suspended moment of tension, opposing forces come into play — the restrained and the free, the known and the unknown. The hunter, mounted to the wall and frozen in tension, raises an arrow toward a freer, roaming aspect of the self. Here, the self is not singular but split — circling itself in ritual, confrontation, and longing. It is in this moment of confrontation that transformation becomes possible.
light leaves this prism| Eve Brown
Being enchanted with this world involves being with all of this world. Being in love requires us to accept grief. Feeling joy requires us to know pain. Watching the spring bloom requires us to know the tight squeeze of the winter bud. One cannot exist without the other.
light leaves this prism is an incantational installation exploring the interconnection of all things and the odd joy-pain within that. Rainbow light leaves the prism in part because of the tight squeeze of the prismatic structure, but that squeeze is exactly what breaks the seemingly singular light into its radiant multitudes.
light leaves this prism utilizes the structure of the shed as the “prism” and the light that filters in to explore how the feeling of rigidity can transform into uncatchable vastness. This installation passes words fraught with boxy rigidness (“I”,“woman”, “sex”, “pleasure”) through the wisdom of the prism. The hand sewn nets act as microscopic lenses-suspending trash, collage and evidence of process, and rooting them down into a large ceramic woman who has herself been shattered into pieces- revealing multiplicity. What filters in as singular or rigid, filters out into endless multitudes, revealing watery edges, and blurring the lines between self and everything at once. This show explores stretching the erotic imagination as the root for constructing a larger sense of connection to this world. It’s an incantation for a more vivid aliveness that spills out from rigid individualism and through play explores the messiness and ever-evolving nature of what it means to be human, of the both/and nature of existence.
exhibit page here
As Above So Below by JD Walsh
This single-channel video work is a digital collage composed of found and appropriated imagery—fragments of digital detritus reassembled into a densely layered visual tapestry. Drawing on his background as a commercial motion graphics designer, Walsh utilizes software tools engineered to simulate physical laws, which lend the piece a dynamic and unpredictable quality. The imagery spans across human-constructed hierarchies, from buried bones and hidden treasure, to the flora and fauna of the terrestrial world, ascending through the Western construction of the heavens, and extending outward into the vast unknowns of space. The work reflects on the ways digital culture compresses and flattens symbolic systems, creating a new kind of mythic space through motion and accumulation.
Whitespace Summer Exhibitions (fridays) | 06/06/2025 11:00 AM