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Glen Echo Park's Stone Tower Gallery presents intimate exhibitions of work in the Park’s most historic structure. This gallery is a welcoming space for visitors and is well suited to solo or themed exhibitions featuring a small group of artists.
Saturdays & Sundays | 12pm to 6pm
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Opening Reception: Saturday, January 11 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm
RSVP (preferred, not required)
Artist Statement
Jill McCarthy Stauffer’s work explores the transmutation of natural spaces through memories, myths, and digital manipulation. In local and coastal ecologies, they see metaphors for transformation, growth, cycles of death, and the hope for restoration. Mixed media installations combine personal experiences of light, sound, and shape in nature with scanning and natural samples in order to unify both qualitative and quantitative experiences of natural places. Stauffer negotiates the increasingly interconnected relationship between technology, memory, and nature — the quality of the representation of natural landscapes in digital interfaces, built with materials mined from the earth, increases as the natural environment is further degraded. At the core of the work is a sense of anticipatory grief - of fear for a future where natural spaces are primarily experienced through digital media in the absence of the original, and how this shapes our relationship with the natural world.
Artist Bio
Jill Stauffer is an installation artist from Pembroke Pines, FL, currently living in College Park, MD. They are a third year MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of Maryland, College Park where they also work as a Teaching Assistant. In 2019, Jill received a BA from Middlebury College with majors in Studio Art and Architectural Studies. Jill has participated in artist residencies with NE Sculpture, Josephine Sculpture Park and Snow Farm. Notable exhibitions include the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts Juried Exhibition at TF Green Airport, Currents at NE Sculpture Gallery, and LevelUp at the Brentwood Arts Exchange, where they received the Juror’s Award. Jill’s research at the intersection of art and technology has been recognized by their reception of the ArtsAmp Interdisciplinary Grant and the Clarvit Research Fellowship from the University of Maryland. Their work has been featured in articles by the Washington Post and the Independent RI. In addition to their art practice, they have worked in support of community arts organizations as an arts administrator and teaching artist. Jill creates mixed media installations that explore the transmutation of the natural environment through digital documentation, artificial replication, storytelling, and memory.
Exhibition Concept Statement
If Saltwater Heals Wounds features three new media installations that reference the coastal ecologies of southern Rhode Island, as warped through the memory and digital replication of the artist. Stauffer negotiates the increasingly interconnected relationship between technology, memory, and nature - the quality of the representation of natural landscapes in digital interfaces, built with materials mined from the earth, increases as the natural environment is further degraded. Starting with organic coastal debris collected in these ecologies, Stauffer explores how different methods of documentation (2D scanning, 3D scanning, photography, video recording, and audio recording) augments and alters memories of light, sound, shape, and movement in the environment. Using the products of these documentation methods (3D models, images, recordings), Stauffer devises digital replicas of natural phenomena occurring in these ecosystems as a method of preserving their own memories of these natural spaces in an era of rapid change.
Susan Stacks
A Momentary Immersion
October 5 - November 3, 2024
The Stone Tower Gallery presents A Momentary Immersion, a solo exhibition of drawings by artist Susan Stacks. These drawings are records of a moment of processing. They are fields to review potential problems, identify hierarchy and community among subjective features, and opportunity for convergent problem-solving.
Artist Statement
This series is about finding comfort in interstitial spaces – the formless, liminal forms we’re squeezed through or trapped under that become more personalized and intimate than any intended destination or purpose. Flattening types of actions, counts, pressures into shades, shapes, and dots recontextualizes the trials of one location and lays it out on another landscape for assessment. The finished work is a record of this processing, a depersonalizing of problems to find convergent solutions in their structure.
Artist Biography
Susan Stacks lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and shows with Adah Rose Gallery in Kensington, MD.
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