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Ruins and Refuge explores homes and the ghosts they become, persistent visual metaphors of life and memory.  shared by a group of three artist friends for over a decade.  In Ruins and Refuge, three artists and friends invite you to wander through the haunted corridors of home, where every shadow is a story and every ruin a whispering ghost. Erin, Taylor, and Samael met at Macalester College in the early 2020s.  Since then their artistic practices have moved apart and reconnected a number of times.  Ruins and Refuge, their current convergence centers on iconography of the home and other human-built infrastructure. 

 Samael Leopold-Sullivan

I have always been fascinated by the homes and infrastructure we build, how much labor it takes and yet how fragile it all is when faced with time and natural forces.  We sweep the floors, unclog the drains, replace rusted bolts, patch concrete; an eternal battle with the decay that will outlast us all.  I recently moved into a loft that I own and I feel like a small creature running around a big spaceship constantly fighting the spectre of a hull breach, of the universal rot slowly creeping in despite my frantic efforts at maintenance.  Part of me wants to surrender, lay down and let the dust bunnies roost in my eyelashes.  Yet, I continue to sweep and mend and build my own structures that will one day return to the dust from whence they came.

 Taylor Champoux

Much of my work is driven by my experiences as an observer. In my illustrations, I enjoy combining imagery from places I visit and the natural world with storytelling and imagined spaces. My pieces in this exhibit blend places that are old or mysterious with ghostlike creatures that inhabit and explore them. Although I often like to work in color, using graphite allowed my focus to be on creating value and detail within the various compositions, and added to the old or mysterious feeling of each piece.

 Erin Holt

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with human made structures- I’ve been fascinated by their design, their utility, their longevity, and their inevitable decline.  Occasional creative dabbling in this area of interest has ballooned in recent years to become an artistic fixation.  My housing situation began to come apart and the stress that built on pace with such uncertainty placed a weight of dread on my shoulders the likes of which I’ve never otherwise felt. To cope with the fear and despair I began drawing houses, shacks, cabins and ruins; I started weaving paper together to build abstracted constructs harkening to brick and mortar and wood and steel; I needed to exorcise some of the fear I felt about losing stability and safety and belonging and so I turned to the refuge of making.  What started as therapy and an eviction of darkness became something more like witchcraft.  With each of the structures I shaped it felt more like a manifestation: a summoning.  I’ve been very lucky to have support from friends and family which has helped me recently to secure a housing situation I can rely on, but the desire to explore the ‘home’ persists.  For so many people the thought of owning a home or finding any housing situation that feels truly stable and secure is an unreachable dream.   These works treat on that feeling- the loneliness, the desire, the uncertainty, and the hope.