Join us for the opening reception of Claire Whitehurst and Kassandra Palmer’s exhibition: Folie a Deux
“The narrative potential that can be embedded within visual objects, such as paintings, drawings, and sculpture is what motivates this show and the work within it. These works aim to not only reveal the narrative of process, but the logical development of thought between two artists who are interesting in reading objects as they are created and found – and questioning the boundaries of wonder when assessing those objects. Folie à deux, or madness of two, refers to the psychological occurrence when two individuals transmit thoughts and visions back and forth to one another. This idea is something that we have talked often of together, and are interested in as a means to make images in collaboration with one another. This work explores the liminal space between physical and psychological relationships of sensibility and emotion, the archeological qualities within the surface of objects as mythology, and the possibility of story-telling through an object’s formal characteristics.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Whitehurst is an artist living and working in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is teaching and pursuing her MFA in Painting at the University of Iowa. She was born in Louisiana and raised in Mississippi, earning her BFA at the University of Mississippi and a Post Baccalaureate degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, PA. Her work can be found in private collections throughout the United States, and abroad in France and Germany. She has permanent public commissioned installations in Jackson Academy’s Performing Art Center in Jackson, Mississippi, and St. Jude’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work explores the possibility of narrative through an object’s formal qualities as well as questioning psychological relationships we have with images within our visual world.
Kassandra Palmer was born in Fairfield, California and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She attended college at Santa Clara University where she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in physics, and she is a recent graduate of the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Painting and Drawing. Her making process is rooted in experimentation and is continuously upended by private experiences of isolation, faith, failure, and triumph; in her work she leaves room for the unexpected and listens for echoes that ring true but do not compute. Kassandra currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and at Carroll University.