HABITATION

.WITH SPECIAL GUEST SHAUNA PECK

APRIL 29- JUNE 1, 2022

5435 Richmond Rd, Williamsburg, Virginia, 23188, (757) 675-6627

"Habitation," on view at the Linda Matney Fine Art Gallery through June 1, 2022, assembled a diverse group of artists—including Shauna Peck, Asa Jackson, Eliot Dudik, and Elizabeth Mead—to explore the complexities of human existence within our shared environments. The exhibition oscillates between reverence and critique, juxtaposing the sublime allure of the natural world against the stark realities of contemporary crises: environmental degradation, sociopolitical upheaval, and mental health challenges. This approach invites viewers to contemplate the dualities inherent in habitation—beauty and destruction, solace and turmoil—prompting a nuanced reflection on our collective human condition.

FEATURED ARTISTS INCLUDE SHAUNA PECK, ASA JACKSON, ELIOT DUDIK, ELIZABETH MEAD, NICOLE SANTIAGO, LUTHER GERLACH, JOHN R. G. ROTH, RYAN LYTLE, KRISTIN SKEES, NOREEN DEAN DRESSER, GLENN H. SHEPARD, SIDNEY ROUSE, IRIS WU, MARK EDWARD ATKINSON, TEDDY JOHNSON AND OTHERS

Special thanks to Victoria Erisman for her thoughtful preliminary work on Habitation, which helped lay the foundation for the exhibition’s curatorial development. Her early contributions to research and organization played an important role in shaping the project.

REVIsitINg Habitation WITH ADDITIONAL WORKS FROM THE ARTISTS

The Habitation exhibition (Linda Matney Fine Art Gallery, April 29–June 1, 2022) brought together diverse artists to probe the spaces we occupy. In curatorial words, the show “oscillates between reverence and critique, juxtaposing the sublime allure of the natural world against the stark realities of contemporary crises. It “explores the challenges and joys humans face in inhabiting and thriving in our world, from celebrating the sublime beauty of nature… to facing issues like pollution, natural disasters, … and mental health”. The works on view navigate this duality – beauty and destruction, solace and turmoil – reflecting on environmental precarity, memory, and resilience across lands, homes, and minds. Special guest artist Shauna Peck embodies this approach: her multimedia installations fuse technological elements with landscapes, investigating “universal metaphors” about nature and humanity . Together the works (photographs, sculpture, textiles, prints, installations) reveal how our environments – from wide-open fields to intimate interiors – can be both sanctuaries and sites of challenge.

Nature, Landscape, and Environment

Eliot Dudik, Paradise Road, Waldo, Kansas (left) and Eliot Dudik,, Paradise Road, Orrville, Ohio (right)

Much of Habitation honors the beauty of land and sky even as it signals looming threats. Photographer Eliot Dudik’s work, for example, ties “connections between landscape, culture, memory, [and] history” into evocative images of rural life. In Paradise Road, Orrville, Ohio, a child stands with a lamb against a broad green field – a scene of pastoral wonder shot through a prism of memory. In a second photograph, Paradise Road, Waldo, Kansas also featured in Habitation, Dudik captures a panoramic stretch of highway slicing through an empty rural landscape. This image, though less overtly narrative, is equally charged. The road becomes both a literal and metaphorical conduit—connecting, dividing, and extending into an uncertain horizon. Where Paradise Road, Orrville, Ohio suggests the intimacy of human presence within nature, this second work reflects the vastness and loneliness of constructed environments, and the psychological weight of traversing them. Luther Gerlach’s gelatin silver prints confront environmental loss with material intensity. Documenting the aftermath of the Thomas Fire in Southern California, Gerlach incorporates ashes from the fire directly into his darkroom process. The resulting images—streaked, shadowed, and chemically altered—bear the physical imprint of disaster. These haunting landscapes become not only records of destruction, but meditations on impermanence and resilience.

Eliot Dudik, Paradise Road, Waldo, Kansas

Luther Gerlach, *Ghost Trees*, 16x20" unique silver gelatin print, 2018

Luther Gerlach, Rose Valley Manzanita #4, 30x40" unique silver gelatin print and Luther Gerlachm *Swirling*, 2015 ,Tintype, 14 × 17 in from our INTERVIEW WITH LUTHER GERLACH

Diane Covert, Linda Barker and Rosie Webb, 1987

Diane Covert, Essig Family , Missouri City , 1986

Diane Covert, Cora Mae at 100, 1987. and and Diane Covert, RIck Covey, Missorur City, 1988

Other works confront nature’s fragility. Documentary photographer Diane Covert’s Midwestern series captured the fallout of 1980s farm crises: she “photographed family farm foreclosures,” then documented every household in a small rural community grappling with economic decline. These stark images of empty barns and weary families underscore the precarity of agricultural life. Meanwhile Noreen Dean Dresser’s fire-scarred installations examine the aftermath of wildfires and climate change, probing how “human agency” intersects with environmental disaster.. Elizabeth Mead’s Greenspring Williamsburg brings a meditative stillness to the natural landscape. Shot with a pinhole camera in a marshland near Williamsburg, the photograph captures trees dissolving into mist and reflection. The soft focus and long exposure of the pinhole process create a sense of temporal drift, as if the image were suspended between presence and memory. Mead’s practice, rooted in observational precision and formal restraint, invites viewers to slow down and consider the subtle rhythms of the natural world. Together, these works illuminate the dual nature of habitat – as something sublime to cherish and as a system in critique.

Noreen Dean Dresser, COURIERS OF OUR NATURES

Iris Wu, 吴靖昕, Untitled(tea), 2019, Gelatin Silver Print, 11x14”, Edition of 5 +1AP and Untitled(us in the field), 2019,, Gelatin Silver Print, 11x14”, Edition of 5 +1AP

Embodiment and Intimate Space

The photographs of Iris Wu, 吴靖昕 quietly explore the emotional terrain of intimacy, embodiment, and everyday ritual. In Untitled (peeing in the snow) (2020), a lone figure crouches nude in a winter forest—an act of physical release made poignant by the stillness of its surroundings. The image evokes both exposure and communion with nature, reminding us that habitation includes the body and its most personal routines. In Untitled (tea), a gentle exchange unfolds in a domestic setting, as one figure offers tea to another resting under a blanket. The soft light and close framing emphasize the intimacy of care, portraying home not as structure but as a quiet act of attention. Us (in the Field) captures two figures standing in tall grass, one gently holding the finger of the other behind their back. The gesture—small, deliberate, and intimate—quietly conveys trust, connection, and emotional presence. Across these works, Wu frames habitation as something deeply felt rather than simply occupied—a state of mutual awareness, where bodies, gestures, and environments meet in moments of shared experience.

Iris Wu, 吴靖昕,, Untitled (peeing in the snow), 2020, Archival Pigment Print,20x24”, Edition of 5 +1AP

Asa Jackson. Redlines and Water-ways (2022), hand-sewn textile with mixed fabric, 68x56x24

Material and Memory

Asa Jackson. Redlines and Water-ways (2022), hand-sewn textile with mixed fabrics. Other artists address our built and cultural environments through craft and material. Asa Jackson’s textile collages, for instance, literally stitch together global histories. By cutting and sewing fabrics from different countries and eras, Jackson “metaphorically mixes cultures, time periods, people and places into unified works of art. In Veer, colorful scraps form a quilt-like cityscape of memory, a tapestry of personal and communal narrative. Habitation also turns its gaze inward, exploring the emotional and psychological dimensions of home. Kristin Skees, in her By a Thread series, photographs friends and family encased in hand-knit, cocoon-like “cozies.” These portraits blur the line between comfort and containment, raising questions about identity, intimacy, and the roles we perform in domestic life. The works resonate with humor and tenderness, while also suggesting isolation, transformation, and the fragile nature of personal space.

Christi Harris’s collage Wedding Announcement Icebergs combines vintage wedding invitations with cut-out illustrations of icebergs, beds, and anonymous figures. The composition floats between dream and critique: elegant typography and romantic iconography are set adrift in a surreal, fragmented seascape. Harris’s use of pattern, repetition, and formal balance gives the work a seductive beauty, even as it questions the stability of tradition and domestic ideals.

Her broader practice, which includes oil paintings based on enlarged images of her own palette in trompe l’oeil detail (Meta-Palettes), positions the act of making as both content and critique. In Habitation, Harris’s collage work connects most directly to questions of ritual, gender, and the cultural scripting of intimate life. Her materials—wedding announcements, found imagery, fragments of domestic symbolism—serve as both medium and message.

Kristinen Skees, Eliza June, Photograph, 2019

Christi Harris, *Wedding Announcement (Icebergs)*, Collage

Sculpture in Habitation also mashes up fragments of experience into hybrid forms. John R. G. Roth creates tiny model-scale sculptures that merge objects from model trains, ships and fantasy worlds. Each piece is a “distillate of experience”– a mash-up of memories, travel, childhood toys and daydreams – aiming to “engage, amuse, and provoke” by collapsing past and presentl. Even Shauna Peck’s installations, though technological, feel materially grounded: reviewers note her “deftness in the use of a variety of materials” and a focus on “the interconnectedness between technology and the natural landscape. Across media – cloth, model, digital print, found object – these works make tangible the layers of memory, culture and identity that shape how we inhabit space.

John R.G. Roth, Cenotaph For The Blithely Alacritous, cherry, epoxy clay, model scenery, digital image

Shauna Peck, *Time,* Mixed media (left) and *Gift I,* Mixed media (right)

Glenn Shepard, Smoked fish. Baniwa people, Upper Rio Negro, Amazonas, Brazil. 2018.

Psychological Landscapes and Cultural Memory

The concept of habitation extends beyond physical shelter—it also encompasses the psychic, symbolic, and cultural structures we carry within us. Teddy Johnson’s Clouds stages a dreamlike encounter between memory, identity, and inner weather. A figure with a cloud for a head sits in a field of watchful turtle toys, while sketched portraits drift above on other cloud forms. The surreal composition blends childhood nostalgia with emotional opacity, hinting at unresolved grief or intergenerational reflection. Johnson’s richly painted surfaces and symbolic vocabulary invite viewers into a psychological space where emotions gather and shift like passing weather systems—both familiar and unknowable.

Glenn Shepard’s photographic work bridges ethnography and visual poetics. In Smoked Fish. Baniwa People, Upper Rio Negro, Amazonas, Brazil (2018), a man presents a metal bowl filled with fish, his expression calm yet unreadable. Behind him, a cross leans into the landscape, an ambiguous marker of faith, colonization, or mourning. Shepard, an anthropologist and filmmaker as well as a photographer, brings deep cultural engagement to his visual documentation. The image evokes subsistence, ritual, and resilience, capturing a quiet moment shaped by both ancestral practice and modern precarity.

Together, these works underscore the layered ways we inhabit not just environments, but internal and inherited worlds—spaces shaped by memory, tradition, and emotional depth.

Psyche, Domestic Space, and Resilience

The exhibition also turns inward, exploring our interior worlds and community resilience. Many works grapple with personal history, psychology and social support systems. Benjamin Rouse’s surreal analogue photographs, for example, use water, mirrors and botanical elements to externalize inner states. His striking prints (e.g. a figure with wildflowers erupting from the head) examine themes of “entropy, illusion, and personal acceptance”, reflecting Rouse’s own journey through mental health challenges. Embodied in his haunting black-and-white images is the idea of the home or body as a psychological landscape – beautiful yet mysterious. Likewise, photographer Mark Atkinson has directed documentaries on “homelessness, poverty, mental health”. His compassionate lens turns to those on society’s margins, reminding viewers that social support and empathy are part of our habitat too.

Mark Edward Atkinson, she took comfort in all that remained, 20x30 print (archival Hahnemuhle paper) edition of 25

Noreen Dean Dresser, No 36 (Psalm 36 ref), Matches, Drawing with Fire, acrylic, watercolor pencil, ash, graphite pencil,paper, wood panel, copper horseshoe nails, 24”H x 36” W x 2.5D

Nicole Santiago, A Series of Negotiations II, 24.5" x 31.5" oil/linen

Other works evoke domestic memory more literally. Nicole Santiago’s realist paintings often draw on family lore and still-life objects, casting the home as a repository of myth and personal history. Noreen Dresser’s pieces, rooted in her civic work, bring “ethical questions” into public viewl, emphasizing community resilience after disasters. Across the show, there is a sense that homes and neighborhoods hold stories of survival: sculptures, photographs and textiles alike gesture to the networks – family, culture, spirit – that help people endure upheaval. In this way Habitation is as much about interior life and social bonds as it is about landscapes.

Conclusion

Habitation ultimately asks us to look at space in a new way. From sweeping vistas to a single patchwork quilt or a solitary window, these artworks remind us that every environment is imbued with meaning. They honor our reverence for nature, our need for shelter, and our creativity – even as they quietly critique ecological and social harm. As curator John Matney notes, the exhibition prompts “a nuanced reflection on our collective human condition In the end, the show’s tone is clear: our very dwellings – whether a forest grove, a community room, or the landscape of the mind – are places of both solace and struggle. This complex duality lies at the heart of Habitation, inviting viewers to consider how beauty and unrest coexist in the world we build and share.