Monday, February 26, 2024 – The Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish College of the Arts is pleased to announce the upcoming sabbatical exhibition by Cornish Associate Professor Laura Hart Newlon. The exhibition, titled The Carpenter and the Gardener, opens March 1, 2024.

From her artist’s statement:

“This work began with the distinct impression of my body as a prop; furniture; a doorstop; a complex, interdependent system; a blunt object, an unreliable narrator; a weight in need of carrying.

The entwinement of care, labor and physicality form a knot both delicately crafted and stubborn. Everyday gestures of touch and support or dependency play out both tenderly and forcefully upon a body; these relational systems also exist in the studio, in the encounters between materials and the hand.

Creating these objects and images – both moving and still – is my attempt to map intersections of care and the precarity and necessity that accompany them. This work, like the work of so many caregivers, is the result of meticulous plans colliding head-on with happenstance and a dissonant tangle of perpetual change. This is also the story of the gentle sidelong attention and benign neglect that, somehow, maintains the fragile system.”

Artist Bio

Laura Hart Newlon is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator whose recent work explores materiality and conditions of visibility related to the body and image-making. Newlon has exhibited her work at various museums, galleries and artist-run spaces nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions and screenings at the Frye Art Museum (Seattle), Bridge (Chicago), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), Specialist (Seattle), the Bellevue Art Museum (Bellevue), Giove International Film Festival (Italy), and the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts (Providence). Her work is included in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and Photographic Center Northwest. Newlon holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013) and an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington (2010). She lives in Seattle where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Cornish College of the Arts, co-directs the artist-run gallery Specialist, and parents two young kids who love bagels and digging holes.

Laura Hart Newlon: The Carpenter and the Gardener

The Behnke Family Gallery
1077 Lenora Street
Seattle, WA 98121

March 1 – 30, 2024

Opening reception: Friday, March 1 5-8pm