Join us for the 2026 Iowa City Press Co-op Member Exhibition!

Visit during regular gallery hours (Fri 4-6p & Sat 12-3p) or during our double open-house events hosted at the PS1 Northside houses (225 & 229 N Gilbert St) to welcome participants in Frogman’s Printmaking Workshops:

• Friday, July 3, 7-9pm

• Friday, July 10, 7-9pm

Free and open to all!

Muddling Through brings together sculpture and mixed media to explore resilience, identity, and the quiet labor of endurance through both personal and collective experience. Mirzam Pérez’s practice is grounded in textile sculpture and layered materials, where fabric, found objects, and vivid color fields evoke landscapes of memory, movement, and belonging. Her work often navigates borderlands—geographical, cultural, and emotional—using symbolic references to land, water, and mapping as ways to reflect on displacement, adaptation, and lived history.

In this exhibition, sculptural forms enter into dialogue, embodying the act of “muddling through” as both strategy and state of being. The Icelandic phrase þetta reddast (Muddling through) functions as a guiding tension—offering comfort, irony, and perseverance in the face of uncertainty. Through tactile surfaces and shifting imagery, Perez invites viewers to slow down and inhabit spaces of ambiguity, where fragility and strength coexist. The exhibition unfolds as a poetic meditation on survival, care, and the creative possibilities that emerge when outcomes remain unresolved.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Mirzam Pérez is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, mixed media, and photography. Her practice centers on textile-based processes, layered materials, and symbolic forms to explore themes of resilience, migration, belonging, and the relationship between land and identity. Drawing from personal narratives and collective histories, Pérez creates tactile environments where fragility and strength coexist, often referencing mapping, water, and landscape as sites of memory and transformation. Her work embraces uncertainty as a generative space, reflecting an ongoing inquiry into survival, care, and adaptation. Through material experimentation and poetic visual language, Pérez invites viewers to linger within states of becoming rather than resolution.

DEAD OR AMAZING is an experimental, immersive, interactive video installation that responds to audience movement and sound to generate a visual and sonic environment unique to each viewer. Through Isadora software linked to a camera, a microphone, and multiple projectors, viewers activate a composite of hand-drawn elements, video effects, and sounds driven by their body’s motion. These elements are layered together and projected across a 180° field, immersing viewers in a wall of imagery. Each result is unique, asking viewers to engage physically to explore different outcomes.

DOA combines mixed-media drawings by Ethan Edvenson with sounds and video by Charles Borowicz. Edvenson’s style of layering and collage, composed in a web of relationships in which individual images are sourced from memories and his everyday life, serves as a visual launching point for Borowicz’s mixture of synthesized and real-world audio sampling and video imagery exploring the ordinary and the fantastic. 

DOA asks the viewer to investigate ideas of authenticity, replication, authorship, computers as tools, and the human element in art. What does creation require? How does intention inform the final product? Is randomness a valid method of expression? In this moment of AI becoming more and more accepted as a valid tool of production, what is the importance of the human element?

Financial support for this project has been provided through an Artist Career Accelerator Grant by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Iowa Arts Council, which exists within the Iowa Economic Development Authority.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Ethan Edvenson is a visual artist from Des Moines, Iowa, who creates multi-media drawings on paper and through video using India ink, chalk pastel, and photography. His work celebrates the immense value and purpose in each of us through themes of humor, transformation, and the pursuit of what’s eternal. By using gestural mark-making, surreal imagery, and narrative elements, Edvenson’s heavily layered pieces invite viewers into a complex visual wilderness.

Edvenson earned a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Northern Iowa. His work has been featured in multiple solo and group exhibitions across the Midwest. In addition to his visual art, he has also contributed to various book and film projects.

Charles Borowicz is primarily a photographer and video artist interested in rebalancing scales of attention, elevating the mundane, and questioning the fantastic through a practice of deliberate looking, collecting, culling, and finishing.    

He allows a strong relationship to chance within his highly crafted imagery, incorporating uniquely technical and creative methods to achieve ambitious work. 

Borowicz has shown work across the United States. His recent large-scale immersive video piece, “Semblant,” is on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

on view Oct. 31 - Dec. 13, 2025
reception & zine-making: Sat. Nov. 8, 4-6pm

featuring prints from the 2024 T4T print exchange
by Abby Neale (Boston, MA), CM Wain (Ontario, CA), Drew Robinson (Pittsburgh, PA), Evan Eger (Pittsburgh, PA), Gabriel Pezoa (Chicago, IL), Julien Riendeau (Chicago IL), Keira Donnely, (Chicago, IL), Martin, Max Seckler (Chicago, IL), Nic Sealer (Pittsburgh, PA), Parker Anment (Louisville, KY), Paxton Dillon (Pittsburgh, PA), Jacob Romm (New Haven, CT), Reid Rosati (Chicago, IL), Simon McNeil (Prospect, KY), Taylor Nys (Chicago, IL), Vero Hernandez I(owa City, IA)

“T4T started as a way for trans people to find other trans people to be in relationships with, now it’s expanded to include community, safety, social lives, and more. This exchange acts as a call into the ether for more connection and community with other trans artists. 17 of us across state lines, and even country borders, responded with prints of trans joy during a time where our existence, and our joy,  is being further pushed out of public life.”  - Vero Hernandez, print exchange participant and exhibition organizer

“The T4T print exchange comes about in a time where trans voices are being erased. It feels like the most deserving people to archive this work are each other. The theme of the exchange is “trans joy” and this is the work of 17 artists who came together to explore that theme. The collaborative and community aspects of printmaking are part of what makes it such an important medium. Print exchanges being one of the most wonderful traditions among printmakers. This has always been one of the most accessible mediums for artists to be able to share their voices. While I was connecting with the community during the duration of making these prints and exchanging them, I could feel the importance of that tradition.” - Julien Riendeau, print exchange organizer

artist talk: Wednesday October 1 at 5pm
reception: Wednesday October 1 from 6-8pm
gallery walk: Friday October 3 from 5-8pm
on view: Fridays 4-6pm and Saturdays 12-3pm, or by appointment (gallery@publicspaceone.com)

ABOUT THE WORK:

The present polymer clay sculptures serve primarily to promote and celebrate Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples' values and cosmovisions, and especially the Costumbres, or "Old Ways," along with the ritual specialists who sustain them. Each sculpture reflects my understanding of said themes at the time of its creation. Though I grew up in a small town more aligned with Western culture than traditional ones, my semi-decontextualized sculptures are themselves more aligned with the latter through the iconography and meanings that compose them. These sculptures are composed of vibrant swirling color combinations and depict scenes that generally include humans and other-than-human beings performing actions concerning traditional Mesoamerican ritualism, especially in regards to themes of world renewal and participation in universal networks of relations, as expressed through Flower Worlds’ spirituality and related signification systems. For Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica and Southwest USA, Flower Worlds, as denominated in ethnography and anthropology, are essentially ideal, yet experientially real, deified embodiments of the sacred living Earth as transcendent yet immanent prodigious cosmic expressions of abundance, positivity, healing, and renewal in the living environment. Furthermore, Flower Worlds can be conceptualized as extremely sacred locations, multifaceted agential dimensions of the living universe, and as highly cherished generative qualities of the cosmos. In Mesoamerica, and throughout the Indigenous Americas, the forces and processes that generated and maintain the cycle of life renewal in motion, have long been and still are elevated to divine status of the highest degrees.

The Old Ways have long been practiced and created throughout what is now called Mesoamerica, from times immemorial to the present. The highly significant concepts and noble values expressed through these ancestral practices and related creations are among my most important sources of inspiration, not only for creative endeavors but for many other aspects of life. From extreme antiquity, the diverse expressions of the prodigious Old Ways, such as Flower Worlds spirituality, reveal that Indigenous peoples across what is now called the Americas have honored the past and the ancestors, have respected the natural environments we are all ultimately part of, and have worked to exist in harmony with the natural processes and cycles of inhabited areas as much as possible. By integrating ritualism into these and other endeavors of life, the latter are elevated to spiritual work of divine degrees, with effects of cosmic magnitudes. Through these virtuous modalities of cognition and operation, the synchronization of inner and outer processes is catalyzed, resulting in the experiential unification of the person, the community, and the rest of the cosmos into a harmonious totality in constant renewal. These sophisticated ancestral Indigenous expressions and wisdom are more relevant now than ever. As the globally dominating capitalist powers continue to devastate the biosphere, it is precisely these exemplary traditional values and practices that provide, as they always have, viable alternatives to the shortsighted and destructive ways in which said powers engage with natural environments throughout Mother Earth.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

My name is Narciso Meneses Elizalde. I am from Hidalgo, Mexico, originally Indigenous lands still inhabited by displaced Nahua, Hñähñu, and Ñuhu (or Yùhu) peoples. Like a large amount of the population in Mexico, I am from an area increasingly more aligned with western culture, but which was originally also composed of culturally disconnected or distanced Indigenous diaspora, although of unknown affiliation due to the destructive unfolding of colonization processes and its consequences (one of my grandparents was of more direct Indigenous descent, likely a descendant of Nahua or/and Ñuhu Indigenous groups). In addition, a couple of family members on my mom's side are traditionally trained healers, and their guidance, wisdom, divine gift of healing, and spiritual strength, have sustained the well-being of numerous people in their corresponding communities, including myself. For the past few years, I have lived and worked in and around what is now known as Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, in the originally Indigenous lands now known as the state of Iowa, USA. I earned my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 2013, and I have participated in several exhibitions in Eastern Iowa and beyond since then at Public Space One, Legion Arts, Dubuque Area Arts Collective, The Dubuque Museum of Art, Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, ADC Fine Art, DIY music and art shows, and others. Generally, I create polymer clay sculptures and non-fiction writing through which I promote and celebrate Meesoamerican peoples’ values and cosmovisions. During the past few months, the Big Field Fund (and Public Space One) financed and supported workgroup I am a part of, Revitalizadores del Papel, have been laboring together to revitalize the manufacture and ritual implementation of traditional amate paper in the Otomí-Tepehua Highlands Mexico through our collective project titled "La Fuerza del Papel Amate," to be shared with Iowa and the rest of the world latter this year.

Proximity pairs the work of Iowa City-based artists Sara Ann Cavic and Perla Camacho.

Join us for a reception with the artists Saturday August 23, 6-8pm!

On view at PS1’s Northside gallery August 15 through September 13.
Fridays 4-6pm, Saturdays 12-3pm, and by appointment.

opening reception: Thursday, August 14, 5-7pm
on view: Friday, August 15 through Thursday August 28
open gallery hours: Mon/Fri/Sat 11a-1p, Tues/Thurs 6-8p

Artists @ SUI, established in 2018 as part of the Systems Unlimited Day Program in Iowa City, is a creative studio that supports and celebrates artistic expression among adults with disabilities. The program began with the enthusiasm of two women served by Systems Unlimited who had a passion for making art. Their creativity inspired the formation of a part of the Systems Day Program—one centered around creativity and art. Since then, it has grown to include more than 25 individual artists. The studio was created in response to the many barriers that people with disabilities often face when it comes to making art, including lack of access to supplies, instruction, time, and adaptive tools. Artists @ SUI provides a fun, supportive, and resource-rich space where individuals are encouraged to explore their creativity and develop their artistic voice. 

In addition to offering materials and guidance, the studio fosters personal growth, confidence, and community through daily art-making and multiple exhibition opportunities each year. At its core, Artists @ SUI champions radical inclusion, ensuring that artists with disabilities are seen, heard, and valued within Iowa’s broader creative landscape. The program empowers these artists to take part in conversations and public art spaces as equal contributors. Through staff and program support, daily opportunities to make art, public exhibitions, collaborations, and community engagement, Artists @ SUI challenges traditional notions of who gets to be an artist, while celebrating the unique perspectives and talents of each individual.

on view at PS1’s Northside gallery Nov. 15 - Dec. 14, 2024
Fridays 4-6p, Saturdays 12-3p, and by appointment

In the installation ‘A disturbance in the air’ moving image portraiture, text, and interventions in the gallery space are used to explore gendered experiences of seeing and being seen. The title refers to Aristotle’s understanding of what light was, as well as the change of atmosphere we sense upon realizing we’re being looked at. From a young age, women are taught to survey and assess their appearance, and to attach their worth to it, leading to a split internal experience of becoming both the surveyor and surveyed. Photography has been theorized as both escalating and making literal this objectification; the subject becomes a photograph, an object.

Despite how femme-coded individuals (and other visible marginalized peoples) have been harmed by an external and internalized objectifying gaze, the field of vision is also an important place of connection in our culture. It is possible for the gaze to be reciprocal and affirming. Psychoanalyst DW Winnicott has emphasized being seen by one’s caregiver in childhood development as a crucial validation of one’s existence, arguing ‘the precursor to the mirror is the mother’s face’. And theorist Ariella Azoulay has redefined the photographic portrait as an ‘encounter’, a series of relations between photographer, photographed, and viewer, all of which are active participants. This work plays with these tensions, attempting to create a space of potential for vision and visibility to be transformational.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Clare Samuel is a visual artist originally from Northern Ireland, now living in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BFA from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA from Concordia University. Her work focuses on connection and distances between the self and other, as well as notions of social division, borders, and belonging. Spanning mediums such as photography, video, text and installation, her projects are often a dialogue with the idea of portraiture. She has exhibited internationally, most recently at OBORO, Belfast Exposed, and VU Photo. She teaches at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. Her practice has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council. Clare is co-founder and co-director of Feminist Photography Network, a nexus for research on the relationship between feminism and lens-based media.

Support for this exhibition is provided by the Toronto Arts Council, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Iowa City Downtown District.