Katie Bell
A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place

For Katie Bell, the sculptures in her site-specific installation act as marks, strokes, and fields of color, creating a painting language in architectural scale. Smack Mellon’s industrial interior—24-foot wall, steel columns, and cement floor—serves as the support for this sculptural painting. Made up of found, manipulated, and crafted objects, Bell’s work questions what comprises our visual landscape and how the artificial is often disguised as natural to give it an aura of grandeur. Included are discarded hot tub fragments clad in faux marble and fake rocks from a department store window display. In this immense rubble, the artist imagines what future ruins might look like, an environment in which the natural and the fabricated have become so inextricably merged that stone, fiberglass, and plastic are no longer distinguishable from one another.

Austin Ballard
Shadow Lake

Austin Ballard draws from childhood recollections to create an installation of floating light sculptures and venetian blinds. Often traveling between parents and grandparents growing up, his grandmother’s house in Charlotte, NC, became a symbol of stability because of the way she organized her home. However, attempting to conjure the experience of this domestic space became a disorienting exercise for the artist. As Ballard placed each light sculpture according to hazy recollections of the floor plan, the layering of shades in the installation develops into a metaphor for fallible memories. The shadows cast from the woven lampshades onto the gallery walls further heightens the feeling of distortion, as one might experience during a flashback. Through repeated patterns and fragmentation, Ballard’s work calls attention to the lag, slippage, and reinterpretation of even our most cherished memories.