Whitespace Spring Exhibitions (saturdays)

From the venue:

Oddments of the Lean State | Elizabeth Lide

Oddments of the Lean State will re-contextualize objects from 12 of my installations (1980-2020) and integrate them with new pieces created since 2020. I have made site-specific installations, drawings, and artist’s books for 45 years, keeping specimens from most projects. At Atlanta Contemporary (Nexus) in 1984, I placed pieces out of original contexts in an environmental installation discussed by Xenia Zed and Alan Sondheim in the Sept/Oct 1984 issue of Art Papers. That review resurfaced for me at the time I became fascinated with combining different projects/subjects/time periods.

My work has always had a conceptual base, with materials chosen for messaging. Made and found objects (held for years) feel saturated with memories and time. Issues addressed previously are still around: war, dictators, women’s healthcare, greed, and growth.

With the help of woodworker Malina Rodriguez, wooden structures will support combinations of objects, redefining their meanings with my stream-of-consciousness placements. Oddments: a remnant or part of something left over; of the Lean State is Thomas Jefferson speaking of “the lean state of your soil.” (His full remark was on my 1996 Art Papers Artist Page). Yes, I am looking back, pulling the past into the present, and trying to avoid projections for the future.
exhibit page here

Through Line | Eliza Bentz

With a history spanning millennia, weaving has long been engaged as a craft of function and necessity. In Through Line, Eliza Bentz nods to the distance between weaving’s history as a utilitarian arrangement and its contemporary presence within the scope of fine art. Forsaking the traditional loom and its formulaic woven structure, Bentz shifts the grid into a third dimension. Thus, the planar field of weaving transcends itself, each point of connection spiraling, tubular, towards an eventual locus. Each piece becomes a portal, a bridge, a pathway to be travelled in the imaginings between what once was and what is yet to come.
exhibit page here