Show Statement

 Little Worlds is exactly what its name suggests: a congeries of created, immersive spaces—small windows onto the places where past meets a shared present. Ebaugh’s and Liegel’s work shows a mutual obsession with remnants, the depths that are always latent in surface.  Consider it an invitation: the show is an exploration of form and texture as a means of accessing the personal, whether as tactile echo or abstract distillation of experience.

Natasha Liegel boils traumatic or fleeting narrative down to its essence as an object—as compartmentalized book or box or drawer, arranged for display. In Heart Murmur, miniscule cinder-black boxes encase specific moments of rupture. Paralyzing palpitations during sex, walking, or swimming repurcuss from aggressive red into aftershocks of faded stippling, sweepings of ink. Inside Outside’s chest of drawers, in many ways, mimics a 17th-century cabinet of wonders, except that instead of foreign oddities it hides in its dioramic compartments familiar-seeming textures invoking lost places and times, accompanied by field-recorded incursions from the world outside. By using water-based media in much of her work—particularly in her fold-out book Internal Problem—Liegel cedes much of her control of these narratives to the objects themselves. Ink or watercolor activates on paper in much the same way as experience acts on life: according to its own plan, always bleeding irrevocably into everything that surrounds it.

Lauren Ebaugh’s work likewise evokes the persistence of history, but in a much different form. Ebaugh’s art is an ongoing push/pull between the ethereal and corporeal. Her printed work is decidedly physical—it inspires touch, suggests texture even when flat-printed—but what its very present physicality conveys is often an absence: memory, the indelible marks and traces of time, pieces of the past washed into only faint recognizability. Her untitled series of linoleum prints, in both their shape and their prodigiousness, may bring up notions of propagation (beehived honey farms, cell reproduction) but in their path-riddled, almost wrinkled texture they show traces of wear, time, age, histories extending beyond themselves. In another series family memories are painted meticulously, in minute detail, onto the turn of a single page of a book—preserved almost archivally—while in a third series grand photographic vistas of the 1970s become less image than simple color and texture, a still-indelible imprint of the past in all its patterns.

All works, including installations and series, are available for purchase in part or in entirety.
Please contact Wynde Dyer at (503) 863-1545 for additional information.