THRESHOLDS

One home is drowning and submerged, another is sunbleached, dilapidated but stands resolute
in the sun's orange glow, one is a human sized web suspended in the trees catching light and
attention, another is toylike, rendered soft and squishy. A home has more than four walls and a
roof: it holds and hosts and creaks. It is a stage, a vessel, sometimes a place for refuge,
sometimes a place of pain. More than a dozen artists from the Florida State University Master of
Fine Arts program are exploring the dynamics of these seemingly simple structures. Through
photography, painting, video, performance, installation, writing, textiles and more, these artists
are examining the complicated space called home.
“Thresholds,” opening Friday, October 29 at 7 PM in and around the Carnaghi Arts Building,
located at 2214 BelleVue Way, will offer three expansive sights for viewer engagement. Outside
on the front lawn is a web and a sculpture hanging amongst the trees, inside the former middle
school cafeteria will hold larger installations and further down the hall in the Working Method
Contemporary gallery are even more videos, paintings and textile works.
Madelyn Shinham, creator of the outdoor web, said they build webs as therapeutic action. The
strands are similar to the “support systems coming together to catch me on my way down,
mirroring the social webs we build.” They continued, saying that these webs may not be as
“functional as we would like, but we each have one, and I’m doing my best to make mine
positive.”
Organizer and participant Shelby Hubbard explained how the show came to be.
“I was thinking about the artists in the program and the intense year we have all had and I
realized so many of us are thinking about home, both near and far. But each of us were
approaching this place from different viewpoints and I realized how many of these experiences I
could relate to and how many I couldn’t. Where I can’t relate, I can learn. I can listen. I can
acknowledge and witness and offer respect and I think that’s the power of this show.”
Tracy Milligan is making work about her hometown, Houma, and how it has been impacted by
rising waters. On August 29 of this year Hurricane Ida hit with devastating effects and according
to Milligan, it is projected that by 2040 the entire town will become open water.
Milligan said she creates “large blue paintings to explore connections between hurricanes,
baptisms, cycles, and our ideas about interior and exterior spaces.”
“I hope the show expands viewers' ideas of what home is and can be. How home can be a
person or song, or offer comfort or trauma, or any host of the millions of things out there in the
vastness of the universe,” Milligan continued. “I hope most of all though, that something
resonates and makes a connection with your ideas about home.”
Nik Rye, a community activist and artist who creates socially engaged work will host a
foodshare at the exhibit opening in addition to showing text based and sculptural work.
“In collaboration with the other artists in the show, I hope the viewer can consider new
definitions to this loaded word and how it relates to interconnection,” said Rye. “Personally, I
want to engage the viewer in empathy through trauma and antagonism by challenging their
comfort zone and dismissing permissive idealism as a poor substitute for hope.”
Photographer, Andrew Turner, is showing a large print photo taken in Dulac, Louisiana, a small
bayou community located at the southern tip of Lousina’s Coastline. He said that it is a
“community no stranger to damaging storms and hurricanes that come from the warm waters of
the gulf feet away.”
He continued, “The photograph is of a hurricane damaged home that is unoccupied yet that still
stands. I am exploring how a home can symbolize loss. The home in the image, like many
others of the region, exists in a land that will always be hostile to inhabitants. However that does
not and will not stop the determination of the people who call this region home to stay and
thrive, for many there is nowhere else. I want the viewer to consider what home means to them
and what happens when it's gone.”
This show features work by Jenae Christopher, Camille Modesto, Maryam Takalou, Nik Rye,
Shelby Hubbard, Andrew Turner, Chansong Woo, AnnaBrooke Greene, Makenzie Heinenmann,
Zijie Yue, Michelle Castro, Morgan Smith, Leah Gossett, Iris Schaer, Tracy Milligan, Madelyn
Shinham, and Kat Chudy.
This event is free and open to the public. It is located at 2214 BelleVue Way and will last from 7
p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

- Shelby Hubbard, Curator