Bob Barry and Susan Ziegler will discuss their new exhibitions, The Past Future and Funny Weather, respectively.
Bob Barry works primarily in ceramic sculpture, exploring humanity’s fractured relationship with the natural world and our growing distance from its rhythms. Through clay, he seeks to honor nature and create spaces to hold memory and myth. In The Past Future,an exhibition of new work, Barry continues to explore themes he pursued in his last two BAU solos (Florescence presented flowers gone wild, evoking abundance, disorder, and nature unchecked; The Other World reimagined through a contemporary lens animal forms influenced by ancient Mayan, Inca, and Pueblo traditions). Here, Barry focuses on the delicate veil that separates our present reality from the natural and spiritual worlds. His art reflects a longing for reconnection—a recognition that the boundary between human and nature is far thinner than we acknowledge.
Susan Ziegler's ongoing meditation on nature within the urban environment through a process-based practice of painting and printmaking. Her work begins with drawing from observation, sketching elements such as patterns of shadow and light, plants, and architectural forms. Through a combination of monotype, painting, and collage, she layers these elements, creating a continual push and pull between the role of chance and a search for balance and visual harmony. Inspired by Olivia Laing’s book Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, the work reflects Ziegler's sense of wonder and hope alongside a feeling of uneasiness in the current climate. She aims to capture the complexity, delicacy, and dynamism of her surroundings through abstraction.