Grounds for Departure: A Historic House, An Art Museum

Grounds for Departure will feature abstract painting and sculpture that engages directly with the architecture of the museum’s structure, mapping its domestic history within the walls of the current-day art museum. Through Katie Ford’s found-object sculptural assemblage and Marlisa Dunn’s abstract paintings of flowers, the works on display will explore the traditional boundaries of domestic space and present instead the absurd or unrecognizable abstraction of every-day objects and flora. A distinctly feminine “prettiness” imbues the objects on display, initially aligning with the expectations historically placed on women’s production within a domestic space; however, this surface familiarity is destabilized by both artists as the forms they use become fragmented and reconstituted, abstracting their origins and reversing the logic of a produced object. Through this reversal, the exhibition reframes domestic space not as a place of confinement, but as a site of transformation and departure.

About the Artists:

Katie Ford makes sculptures, textiles, and works on paper that explore the unstable qualities of the body and digital culture. She holds an MFA from the University of Georgia and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Ford has been awarded residencies including the Icelandic Textile Center, the Women’s Studio Workshop, and 100 W Corsicana; and she has exhibited at institutions including the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz), Wassaic Project (Wassaic), Neue Welte (Nashville), and Swan Coach House Gallery (Atlanta). She lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she is a Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute.
www.katie-ford.com

Marlisa Dunn creates paintings that translate sensory memory and natural experience into layered, rhythmic landscapes. Drawing from the sounds, scents, and textures of her surroundings, she paints with collage-like construction—mixing hand-ground earth pigments and gestural oil stick marks to preserve fleeting impressions of place. Her work has been exhibited at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art (Wisconsin), the Richard M. Ross Art Museum (Ohio), the Springfield Museum of Art (Ohio), the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts (California), and the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
marlisadunn.com