UNEARTHED

trisha holt & whitney sage

october 5 - november 4

Trisha Holt is a visual artist and photographer interested in the physical properties of the photographic print and the possibilities of its reproduction as a way to address the power of images in contemporary culture. Her images are printed and positioned as life-size, topographical, and site specific installations which are then re-framed in new photographs or experienced as sculptural objects. Images are appropriated and altered, with echoes of YouTube videos or cult classic movies. Memory is displaced or contested, and what the lens sees is actually happening - though it appears uncanny.

Holt has shown her work nationally in New York, Detroit, Seattle, and Arkansas among others. In 2012, she received her Masters of Fine Art, Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work is represented by the David Klein Gallery in Detroit, MI. She is an Assistant Professor and Gallery Director at Siena Heights University in Adrian, MI.

Whitney Sage is a multidisciplinary artist whose creative work spans media of painting, fibers, installation and community-based practice to address how the histories and conditions of America's "Rust Belt" cities relate to both identity construction as well as crises of identity in the aftermath of destruction and generational disinvestment. Sage's work features midwestern cities like Detroit as sites of increasing cultural relevance to larger nationwide struggles; big industry and suburban migration leaving behind empty storefronts, abandoned homes and in turn, eroding the communal bonds that exist around them. No matter the medium utilized, her work aims to empathetically connect the audience to the plight of disappearing communities, often using allusions to the home as a relatable entry point and a metaphor for our shared psychological interior, the mind, which is the root of longing and nostalgia for place. While Sage's practice is vested in the potentially insular experience of growing up within a struggling city, her work seeks to appeal to many through universal notions of home, loss, hope and the protective impulses we share for the places and people we love.

A native of suburban Detroit, Whitney Sage currently serves as Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at Siena Heights University. Sage's work has been featured nationally in exhibitions at The Painting Center, Superfront LA, UICA, The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and the Muskegon Museum of Art. In 2011, she received her MFA from the Sam Fox School of Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis after earning bachelor's degrees in Painting and Art Education from Miami University.