01/18/2025 - 03/29/2025
Project Room, Mills Gallery
1–6pm, Wed.—Sat.
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On view: Jan. 18–Mar. 29, 2025
Opening Reception: Jan. 17, 2025 | 6–9pm
Join us for an evening celebrating the opening of two new exhibitions at the Mills Gallery! In the Project Room, explore absorption, the latest work by BCA Studio Resident, chelsea silbereis. In the main gallery, experience Waste Scenes by Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin.
From 5–8pm, the BCA Artist Studios Building will host a building-wide Open House, where current residents in the BCA Studio Residency program will open their studio doors to the public. Come meet the artists, see their work in progress, and get an inside look at the creative process!
Statement from chelsea silbereis:
absorption explores the healing power of giving in to a singular experience, particularly within the intimate landscape of family life. Becoming a parent opened a thousand wounds from childhood, but at the same time made me want to be completely healed to be the best possible parent. With this work, I’m inviting the viewer to consider the details of their daily life and the possibility of becoming fully absorbed in them to find healing and self-discovery.
threads is an exercise of mending as practice; piecing together familial relationships across generations. The quilt was made by my great-grandmother, and its fabric has worn thin and torn, losing all of its quilting stitches. I have patched it in my clumsy way and re-quilted it, erasing my grandmother’s work, but also building on it by altering it significantly, and making it work for me and my family. The physical mending parallels my parenting, picking carefully what to carry on from my ancestors and what to leave behind.
The photo series, lethargic, examines the deep single-minded absorption and slowness that I’ve witnessed and experienced in my daily life as a parent. The photos consider the possibility of sinking into a feeling, a texture, rest, and anxiety. When I try to rest or give into lethargy, I find myself in tension with the need to be productive. Exploring what it means to be fully absorbed in one thing offers an opening to rest without reservation.
These two pieces together explore self-healing in a familial context, through witnessing and documenting and physically mending familial artifacts. Photography has helped me explore and cope with the emotional landscape of my healing and parenting. Stitching a familial artifact has served as a physical act of healing. This work illuminates different modalities of experience and constitutes a collaborative healing across generations.
chelsea silbereis, primalism, 2024, inkjet print
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