Join us for the opening reception of Making Sense.

Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, Amalia Mermingas and Brooke Frank are exploring the role of language in shaping their ideas about landscape. Their works handle language haptically, dealing with written text as something physical and visual – an analogue for the physical world.

Connected by a shared interest in the relationship between language and landscape, the divergent practices of Amalia Mermingas and Brooke Frank form a dialectical exploration of what it means to try to locate oneself in the world. Mermingas builds forms out of raw clay which live somewhere between ruin and rock, two of the most archetypal features in Romantic landscape painting. She is scratching more at the attempts we make to hold onto the experience of the sublime than she is trying to reconstruct it, pairing her crude constructions with drawings evocative of letters written in an unintelligible hand, in an unknown language. Frank, meanwhile, makes her paintings in thin layers of oil, transcribing, among other things, images of weeds, excerpts from science fictions, and details from other paintings, the cumulative result of which is a landscape formed from dense accumulations of information. All of these things collide and overlap on the surfaces of Frank’s paintings, yielding a space for the renegotiation of meaning and informational hierarchy, and exploring the tenability of optimism outside of fictional spaces.

Together, Mermingas’ and Frank’s work tells the story of a landscape which is changing constantly, not only in the elements or in our hands, but also in our minds as we try to hold it there.