Tiny roads that lead to nowhere…

Friday, July 16 – Sunday, August 29
Opening Reception: Friday, July 30, 5-8pm
Virtual Artist Talk: Wednesday, August 11, 6pm EST on Zoom
Closing Reception: Saturday, August 28, 12-5pm during Cleveland Walls Festival

Tiny roads that lead to nowhere… features the work of Sean P. Morrissey and Lenore Thomas who explore our environments and ideas of home in connected, but different ways. Morrissey deals with domestic and suburban space as it relates to self-identification and identity building. The uniqueness that one hopes to achieve through aesthetic choices is called into question through the use of predetermined and superficial architectural elements. Thomas examines perceptions of home and how those influence personal placemaking and existence. The spaces that ground people shift constantly and exist between stable and precarious. The aesthetic relationship between these two artists creates a conversation on these ideas. The use of color, form, and thoughtfulness of the places we live in, pass through, and hold in our minds are the intersections where Morrissey and Thomas meet. How they consider our world allows the viewer to investigate their own understandings of our shared environments. Through this exhibition, home is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Contained in the exhibition are various series of works on and of paper that range from framed prints, sculptural objects, installation, and artist publications that respond to the space of the gallery.

Sean P. Morrissey

Through prints, works on paper, and artists’ books/publications, Sean P. Morrissey (they/them) investigates the ways we shape the world and our identities through constructed environments. Sean was born and raised on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border and holds an M.F.A. in Studio Art from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a B.F.A. in Two-Dimensional Studies from Bowling Green State University. Sean has been an artist in residence at Seacourt Centre for Contemporary Printmaking in Northern Ireland and Edition/Basel in Switzerland.

Sean’s work has been exhibited in over one hundred venues nationally and internationally in the last decade such as New American Paintings, International Print Center New York, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art (Richmond), Coop Gallery (Nashville), Dedalo Center for Contemporary Art (Italy), and the Biennale internationale d’estampe contemporaine de Trois-Rivières. Sean’s work is held in several public and private collections including the New York Public Library, the Sheldon Museum of Art, and the Weisman Art Museum. Sean P. Morrissey

Lenore Thomas

Lenore Thomas (she/they) is an artist, friend, puppy mom, girlfriend, sister, aunt, teacher and fashion lover who is working on being more vulnerable in order to get the most out of life. She is involved in several projects including three collaborative projects with photographer Ivette Spradlin and another project with composer Eric Moe. If she isn’t making art or teaching, she is traveling, watching movies, spending time with friends, looking at puppy videos on Instagram and hopefully relaxing at the beach.

Thomas’s artwork has been shown in group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Estonia, China, Argentina, and Portugal. Thomas received her MFA in Fine Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BA’s in Religious Studies and Fine Arts from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is currently living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her boyfriend and dog where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Lenore Thomas

Open During Gallery Hours, July 16-August 29:
Wednesdays, Saturdays, & Sundays, 12-5pm
Location Info.

Kasumi + Mark Schatz: 
Let’s Just Pretend (We’re Having Fun)

May 14 – June 18
Hybrid Exhibition: Virtual + Gallery
Kasumi + Mark Schatz: 
Let’s Just Pretend (We’re Having Fun)
Opening Reception: Friday, May 14 / 5pm – 9pm

At this opening, no more than 10 people will be allowed at a time in the gallery. There will be no scheduled times during opening, please be prepared that there may be a short wait to enter. Masks and social distancing measures will be required. 

Exhibition can be viewed in-person by appointment only from May 15th through June 18th. Please send an appointment request to gallery@zygotepress.org

The show will also be featured on our website as a virtual exhibition for the duration of the physical exhibition for those who cannot visit. 

Kasumi
The pieces Kasumi created during her Zygote residency consist of bits of sampled imagery from some of her earlier films, video-art, and paper collages, along with fragments of 80’s manga and graffiti. She deconstructed the images by extracting and reordering sequential frames, creating deliberate misalignments, glitching and shifting masses of pixels, and messing with registration – at times improvising on the spot. Some of the prints have an additional hand-painted layer.

The results may be as much a reconfiguring/remixing/reimagining of her own work as it is an examination of and reaction to the events and political upheaval of this past year.

In a kind of pandemic-induced fever dream, during his residency at Zygote Mark Schatz began re-imagining his print-based experiments as physical objects, using augmented reality to amplify and animate these surfaces and play with scale and movement, suggesting imagined interactions with the world. Through a combination of physical prints and digital animations, In Let’s Just Pretend (We’re Having Fun), studio gestures take on new identities somewhere between public art installations, errant party balloons, and hallucinations.

Mark
While he has long been intrigued by the infinite possibilities apparent in the realms of both printmaking and digital visual effects, Mark has found both somewhat alien to his training and instincts as a sculptor. Eventually, he fused the two learning curves together as a way of forging his own path. Mark found a perverse pleasure in turning the printed images into objects, and projecting the objects into environments. Producing work for this exhibition became a way of processing the psychological disorientation and deceptive banality of a global pandemic.