Talespinner

Works by Laura Camila Medina and Kacey Slone

Presented by Easyside

On view August 2 - September 28, 2024

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Beginning from different suburban sensibilities – Medina, from Bogotá, Colombia and Orlando, Florida, and Slone from Southern Indiana and North Texas – the artists chart paths that traverse memory and fantasy, sadness and solitude. While Medina’s practice relies on an amalgamation of personal symbols and mass media images to fuse together a visual world encompassing her experience of displacement between nations and cultures, Slone’s work fixates on ubiquitous Midwestern objects that signify presence, time, loss, and the conduit to an individual self. 

In Talespinner both artists remember – and misremember – the essence and details of significant places. Often referencing pop cultural and domestic subjects, the artists oscillate between deconstruction and reconstruction of places they once knew intimately. The work reveals how place becomes essential to identity, and furthermore how the choice to document and explore those place memories can constitute a practice of resistance. The works in Talespinner guard the artists’ specific experiences against the possibility of being forgotten or absorbed by the dominant cultural landscape. 

The show interweaves the artists’ shifting states and morphs into a new realm. Windows and screens become portals to past and future experiences. Spider webs and fences gather disparate elements, sometimes displaying and sometimes protecting. Talespinner welcomes the audience into a shared experience, insisting on dream and reflection as a method to establish one’s place of belonging.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Kacey Slone was raised in a cornfield in Southern Indiana. Her work investigates identity, memory, and how place affects one's belonging. By using familiar objects, Slone hopes to connect with others through collective memory. She earned a BFA from Indiana University Southeast in 2018, where she double majored in printmaking and graphic design, and earned her MFA in Intermedia at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2021. She was the 2023 Artist in Residence at Carnegie, Center for Cultural Arts in New Albany, Indiana and recently exhibited work in Kith and Kin: Things Well Known, a two person exhibition with Rachael Banks at Wave Pool Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. She recently co-founded JuniorJr, a Risograph press/studio, with long time friend and colleague Kathryn Combs. Slone teaches at Indiana University Southeast and Auburn University and works as the Gallery Manager for Harrison County Arts.

Laura Camila Medina is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia. Her practice is deeply inspired by the kisses between mountains and sky of her birthplace intertwined with the thematic fantasy-scape and migrant microcosms of Orlando, FL. Her work has been exhibited at Fuller Rosen Gallery, the Portland Art Museum, Nationale, and with the Nat Turner Project. She was awarded the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship, the Dean’s Travel Grant and CCAM Fellowship at Yale University, Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, New Media Fellowship at Open Signal, and various artist residencies including: the Living School of Art, ACRE, and Centrum. Medina is represented by Nationale in Portland, OR. She earned her BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University.