This July, we are pleased to share the work of Carolyn Hazel Drake and Rachael Zur, At Home with the Dead

At Home with the Dead explores the sacred potential in ordinary domestic objects and spaces to connect us to the lives and spirits of the dead. Constructing a visual language from borrowed or fabricated symbols, Carolyn Hazel Drake and Rachael Zur use depicted and actual domestic objects to amplify the conversation between humble spaces and the spirits that dwell there. When viewed together, their work suggests altars or shrines: places for communion with ancestors and memories.

In Carolyn’s work, tender, painstakingly-crafted ceramics and hand-stitched textiles are presented alongside familiar tokens of home, such as clocks, mirrors, and candlesticks. Centered in each installation is a handbuilt funerary urn. These collections of handmade objects and readymades are meditations on the ways humans are sensitive to the surrounding atmosphere, porous to the invisible things that move through the air, be they viruses or wildfire smoke, or spirits and voices of those who have passed on. The finished groupings create a gentle dissonance between the sacred and the mundane and lean hard towards the analog world as a tangible means of processing ephemeral but very real experiences of death and loss.

Rachael’s expanded paintings blend sculptural physicality with traditional painting techniques utilizing an assortment of materials to paint on such as plaster, pumice, ceramics, and fabric. Her paintings depict ordinary objects from living rooms which hold the remaining radiance and tenderness of the departed, though the architectural space itself is left undefined. Working with materials that have weight to them, she grounds ephemeral concepts into an artwork that is physically solid and fixed. The artwork holds the ideas and feelings which are light and almost impossible to contain, similar to how homes can hold the lingering domestic presence of the departed.

Hours: Wed-Sat 12-5