Whitespace Summer Exhibitions (saturdays)

From the venue:

Picnic

This exhibition gathers artists around the picnic blanket—artists who see space and recognize our place within the universe—not with grand declarations, but with a human closeness. Inspired by the film, Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, and its conceptual ancestor Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps by Kees Boeke, we begin at a picnic: a quiet, human-scale gathering, familiar and finite. From this simple scene, the film expands outward to the furthest reaches of the observable universe, and inward to the structure of the atom—reminding us that our perception of significance is always relative, always in flux.

Like the Eames’ journey through magnitudes, these works move between the infinitesimal and the infinite. They explore space—its presence and absence through the lenses of both minutiae and the sublime. Void becomes cinematic, the in-between intentional. There is comfort here in ambiguity, in the pause between frames.

Displaying the meaningfulness of our scale in the immense uncertainty of our current paradigm, romantic nihilism emerges as a logical response. Seemingly our current struggle looks at the fine line between meaning-ful and meaning-less as is challenged at every new cycle. If we are, as Caspar David Friedrich painted us, specks within overwhelming landscapes, then the question is not “Why do we matter?” but “What do we do with the knowledge that we don’t?” A picnic, perhaps—may be a gesture of defiant joy and connection. A gathering of minds under a vast sky.

exhibit page here

RUBBERNECKIN’

Did you know the world ends every 8 – 12 years? Sometimes the endings are swift, other times they feel like the opposite of an end: rather Endless, unwinding, and monotonous. These endings aren’t always planned, but they do happen regularly, as we all know. 2024, 2020, 2016, 2012, 2000. You’d think we’d understand these Endings better by now, what with all the information we have out there, but it is a phenomenon that scientists are still studying.

As the world ends, we inevitably watch as things burn. Our heads turn to the right and to the left, and engage in a perpetual pivot, clocking the apples of our attention. If you look around, all sorts of fires are out there: wildfires, political fires, the infamous, Fire-Under-Our-Asses, firing ranges, hellfire, the list goes on–and does not happen to exclude the car fire I passed outside a Moreland Avenue gas station a few Sundays ago. I stopped and stared and lingered, then turned down a different road home.

RUBBERNECKIN‘ brings together the work of Reuben Bloom, Antonio Darden, and Matthew Evans to triangulate our place in this ending. Where is the runway to the new, strange beginning? How do we evaluate home in a fragmented, capitalized world, and ride it out on this existential tilt-a-whirl?

exhibit page here

Secret Stash - Sam Lasseter

My grandfather had quite the sweet tooth. In his later years he was told he could not have candy to cut back on his weight gain; so he began hiding it, everywhere. The funny thing was, he did not take much care when he hid it. My grandma could not go about her everyday tasks without finding a chocolate bar or a pack of gummies. One time I heard her yelling at him for finding melted chocolate in the ceiling light fixture. Amongst the cousins, it became a game to seek out Pop’s stashes. When we would find one of his candies and tell him, he would plead he knew nothing about it, followed by a sly wink of approval. This shed is a nod to an old man’s sweet tooth and all his half-baked hiding spots.
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.

exhibit page here