Kathleen Vance and Shira Toren at booth #A25
"Carried Ground"
Hidden Landscapes and Material Memory
Artists: Shira Toren and Kathleen Vance
Curated by Daniel Aycock
For SPRING/BREAK 2026, "Carried Ground" brings together the work of Shira Toren and Kathleen Vance in a presentation that explores landscape as something concealed, transported, and remembered. Responding to the theme HIDE N SEEK, both artists investigate how a sense of place can be embedded and imbued into materials, preserved through memory, and reconstructed in their artwork.
Shira Toren's Venetian plaster works are created through processes of layering and removal. The composition and chemistry of her Venetian plaster incorporate pigments and minerals from specific locations, so in this way, her surfaces contain fragments of landscape hidden within their construction. The works function as material records of time and place, where traces emerge gradually through texture, color, and accumulated layers. What initially appears abstract slowly reveals echoes of geological formations, weathered terrain, and sedimentary histories.
Kathleen Vance's "Traveling Landscape" series similarly explore the translation of place, transforming remembered waterways and environments into carefully constructed portable worlds. Housed within vintage luggage and created through an intricate combination of sculptural materials, light, sound, and flowing water, these works blur the boundary between natural landscape and human-made artifact. They suggest the desire to carry, preserve, and reconstruct experiences of place while acknowledging the impossibility of fully controlling and containing nature itself.
Together, Vance and Toren create a dialogue between concealment and discovery. Toren's works hide landscapes within their material structure, while Vance's sculptures present landscapes as constructed fictions that invite close observation and imaginative participation. Both practices ask viewers to seek what lies beneath the surface: geological memory, personal history, and the traces of environments transformed by time and distance.
At SPRING/BREAK, "Carried Ground" presents landscape not as a fixed image but as something continuously shifting between presence and absence, memory and material, reality and representation. The presentation invites viewers into a process of looking, searching, and uncovering, where meaning emerges slowly through sustained attention.