Katherine Spinella's solo exhibition, Dandelion, features a mix of print, image, fabric, light, and altered objects that draw attention to themes of time, aging, and change. Bright signaling colors, insects, stereograms, vegetables, and agricultural symbols highlight the cycles and fragments present in daily life. Inspired by the Greek myth of Persephone and her connection to the seasons, the exhibition underscores the power of holding contrast and its ability to bring depth and meaning to our experiences. Using textured frames, hanging lamps, and celestial hex signs borrowed from the Pennsylvania Dutch folk art tradition creates a sense of intimacy and invites viewers to delve deeper into the emotions that lie beneath the surface of the world. Spinella invites us to contemplate the beauty and complexity of the tangible world and consider the role of fiction and truth in shaping our perception.

Exhibition documentation by Mario Gallucci

With the expansion of digital production in the last 30 years, contemporary images have undergone a metamorphosis where reality plays an even smaller role in artistic development yet images have become more fluid and potent. Once a mirror, a vehicle for expression, or a simple representation of nature, the image no longer relates to reality, rather referring to optics, narrative, marketing, and surveillance. 

This linear development of the post-image happened through the porosity of the new media, creating a fluid environment to the detriment of exclusive specificities of the past. So far, the stories created are of advances and setbacks, where the future can meet, cross or rejoin the past. This non-linear way of creating narratives and reality is what Marcelo Fontana and Katherine Spinella seek to understand in Where the Future Can Meet.

Observed through the proliferation of shared 'photo dumps' as contemporary diaries or still-life paintings of the present, images become unspecific personal artifacts. What would the story on the card in the museum read? The more ordinary or unflattering personal present becomes more "real." In this, we engage with hypervisibility as an absurdity for coping with the present. Like a garden walk or watching a fire burn, we crave instances that are non-decisive moments outside spectacle and production. 

This collaborative installation by Marcelo Fontana and Katherine Spinella utilizes light, fabric, text, moving, and still image to create a space for reflection on topics of transparency, opacity, grief, and longing centered around post-photographic sentiments.

Exhibition documentation by Mario Gallucci

Curated by Dr. Jessi DiTillio, the Thunderstruck Collective is a growing group of artists committed to collaborative engagements with the land arts of the American west through exhibitions and publications. Works by Katherine Spinella, Michael E. Stephen, John Whitten, Kristin Hough, Morgan Rosskopf, Ashlin Aronin

Thunderstruck 2.0: black hole sun is the second in a series of exhibitions inspired by journeys to classic land art sites in the American West. For this exhibition, three artists and one curator traveled to Western Utah to see Nancy Holt’s 1973-76 work Sun Tunnels on the Winter Solstice, shivering and windblown. For the Summer Solstice, the original four returned with three new companions, expanding the collective to seven artists, blasted by sand and sun. The artists participating in Thunderstruck 2.0 bring diverse materials into their work--drawing, painting, photography, dirt, salt, magnetic waves, sound, light, and more--in order to transport viewers and offer an authentic sense of place. At the same time, Thunderstruck 2.0 asks questions of the Sun Tunnels… How does this site frame our perception of light, scale, and emptiness? Who did Holt make this work for? What is the relationship between land art and spectacle?

Part travelogue and part creative revisionism, the Thunderstruck project conjures new responses, affective, energetic, and communal, to art historical sites designed for isolation, solitary contemplation, and transcendence.

Exhibition documentation by John Whitten

When your sweat smells like heavy metals reclassifies imagined post-human artifacts of our digital subconscious and material imprints. This solo exhibition by Katherine Spinella transports the refuse of commerce into multimedia amalgamations that are fractured, layered and codified into a poetic abstraction of signs. In a free association free fall approach, Spinella uses digital manipulation, printmaking, sculpture and video to conflate images and abstract signs as they relate to our perceptions of nature. Familiar warning signs, obtuse punctuation, scribbles, shreds, flames and compost amass in a process of renewal-based gestures that make space for something new and unknown to occur.

Exhibition documentation by Mario Gallucci