Heather Beardsley, Strange Plants, Chicago, 2023, gel pen on found photograph, 8.5" x 11.5", 1 and 2

Lee Matney, *Still Life,* Athens GA , 1994

Installation / Works on Paper 2023 AND OTHER WORKS

Paper—humble yet inexhaustible—anchors Matney Gallery's return to its origin in Installation / Works on Paper 2023. This exhibition gathers more than forty works that stretch, emboss, saturate, and photograph the sheet, revealing how contemporary artists translate memory, identity, and place into tactile form.

Thirteen years after Linda Matney Gallery opened its doors with Installation / Works on Paper, the 2023 edition revisits that touchstone to measure how far paper-based art has evolved—and how powerfully it still speaks. Curated by John Lee Matney, the exhibition gathers artists who treat paper not as a passive support but as an active agent: a surface that can be printed, cut, stitched, photographed, or sculpted into new form. Together, their works chart a continuum from intimate mark-making to large-scale intervention, tracing how stories, materials, and memories are recorded, erased, and renewed on the page.

Jeffrey Whittle, Untitled, Mixed media, 2023

Jill Carnes' "Owl on Paper" is a captivating piece that belongs to her intriguing series "The Parliament of Owls." This series delves into the cultural significance and mystique surrounding owls, presenting them through a humorous lens. The artwork showcases these majestic creatures in playful and absurd scenarios, such as whimsically playing the piano or comically taking over big box retail spaces, effectively eliciting both amusement and contemplation about their role in society and nature.
On the other hand, Lee Matney's photography of Jeremy Ayers and Ada captures a poignant moment from 1994, reflecting the intimate connection between the subjects and the artistic legacy of Ayers, a prominent figure in Athens' art community. Matney’s lens immortalizes Ayers' influence, while simultaneously highlighting contemporary themes through his striking compositions. The exhibition is further enriched by contributions from John Lee Matney, whose photographic work resonates deeply within the artistic narrative.

Elizabeth Mead, Untitled Williamsburg 09, 2018-19 Photograph

Diverse Media and Formats

The exhibition unfolds across a spectrum of media, ideas, and formal strategies. Steve Prince anchors the print wall with commanding linocuts that translate urgent social narratives into bold graphic form. By contrast, Elizabeth Mead and Benjamin Rouse pursue abstraction as a study of perception: Mead photographs her own cut-and-folded paper constructions, using light and shadow to trace the contours of memory and sensation, while Rouse’s spare, rhythmic marks build immersive visual fields from the subtlest gestures. Experimental work reaches a different register in Heather Beardsley’s embroidered “growths,” which spread across found photographs and objects like speculative ecosystems, merging drawing, sculpture, and ecological storytelling into a single hybrid practice

Jill Carnes, Midnight Owl, Drawing , 18×24, 2024 and Steve Prince, Ubuntu, Baldwin’s House, 2024 additions to our work on paper initiatives

Jill Carnes, **Read an Interview with the artist**

Photography and Mixed Media

A quietly luminous photograph by Lee Matney captures an intimate exchange between the late Jeremy Ayers—artist, writer, and noted Warhol Factory figure—and his muse Ada Poole. Printed from a medium-format negative, the image balances documentary precision with emotional depth, touching on memory, legacy, and creative partnership. Its contemplative aura finds an unexpected echo in Jill Carnes’s stylized owl drawings, whose enigmatic forms navigate folklore, archetype, and a dash of Southern eccentricity. Together, these works ground the exhibition in a layered visual mythology—honoring personal bonds while probing psychological nuance and regional identity.

Lee Matney,, Jeremy Ayers and Ada, Version I, 1994

Margo Newmark Rosenbaum contributes a striking monoprint portrait of an eccentric woman, capturing not only likeness but character and creative spirit. The figure’s expressive features and patterned clothing are rendered with playful boldness, echoing Rosenbaum’s prolific painting practice and her ongoing interest in portraying individuality with immediacy and warmth. Known for her acclaimed photographic documentation of the Southern folk and music scene—most notably through her work alongside Art Rosenbaum—she brings to this print the same sensitivity to personality and cultural presence. Her turn to printmaking reveals a sharp observational wit paired with deep affection, offering a portrait that is at once humorous, reverent, and deeply human.

Judith McWillie—a noted scholar of Southern African American vernacular culture—uses photography to link history, memory, and the persistence of the visionary. Her archival pigment print Airplane Bisecting the Moon captures a fleeting moment with quiet precision: a jet cuts across a luminous moon suspended in a dusky sky. At once minimal and suggestive, the image resonates with layered meaning—invoking themes of transcendence, surveillance, technology, and spiritual longing. McWillie’s background as both artist and ethnographer informs her visual practice, allowing her to draw subtle connections between personal observation and cultural narrative. In her work, the poetic and the political are never far apart, each inflecting the other with quiet urgency.Kent Knowles contributes graphite drawings of solitary figures that blend introspective calm with stylized expression, demonstrating a refined use of line and tonal atmosphere. Fellow SCAD professors Robert Brown and Dale Clifford also bring distinct visions to the exhibition, contributing to its dialogue on process, material, and form. Altogether, the show mixes traditional two-dimensional pieces with sculptural and environmental works, emphasizing that paper is only one canvas for creativity.

Lee Matney,, Jeremy Ayers and Ada, Version II, 1994

Psychological Archetypes

In the work of Lee Matney and Jill Carnes, introspection meets allegory. Matney’s atmospheric film photographs fix gestures on the verge of vanishing, hinting at the fragility of memory and the fleeting nature of perception. Shot on traditional analog film, his images preserve moments that feel emotionally suspended—neither fully present nor entirely lost—drawing viewers into a quiet space between presence and absence. His subjects often appear absorbed or inward-looking, suggesting interior narratives that remain just out of reach. These photographs are less about documentation than about evocation: they invite psychological readings, hovering somewhere between portrait and allegory, where expression and environment converge into a scene charged with stillness and suggestion.

Carnes’s spirited owl drawings—equal parts trickster and oracle—draw from surreal and folkloric traditions. Her Parliament of Owls series channels archetypal energy through deceptively simple forms, weaving absurdity and psychological insight into her compositions. Rendered with a hand-drawn immediacy, her owls feel at once comic, mysterious, and unsettling, reflecting the layered emotional states they seem to observe and embody. They function as stand-ins for the viewer as much as the subject—mirroring internal contradictions with a gaze that is knowing, watchful, and just beyond interpretation.

Together, they load their imagery with emotion, leading viewers into narratives that hover between waking life and dream—where symbolism, memory, and myth intertwine.

Nicole Santiago, *Susan Sleeping,* 6x9, charcoal, graphite, contè, and acrylic on toned paper.

Narrative and Identity

Storytelling and self-inquiry thread through many of the works on view. Steve Prince embeds layered social narratives in his dynamic relief prints, drawing on African American visual traditions to prompt reflection on justice, faith, and community. His figures move with symbolic urgency, inviting viewers to bear witness to histories both personal and collective. In her By a Thread series, Kristin Skees photographs friends and family encased in hand-knit, cocoon-like “cozies,” transforming portraiture into a meditation on intimacy, concealment, and the roles we perform within domestic life. Nicole Santiago paints realist figures and still lifes with mythic overtones—quiet scenes that balance emotional precision with allegorical weight, illuminating the tension between routine and meaning. Her compositions often center around women in domestic spaces, subtly evoking questions of labor, care, and inherited roles, while leaving space for ambiguity and interpretation.

Christi Harris assembles wedding invitations and mid-century advertisements into intricate collages that expose how visual culture shapes archetypes of femininity and domesticity. Her compositions blend nostalgia with subversion, revealing the enduring influence of commercial imagery on personal identity. Jeffrey Whittle combines fragments of maps with pink-washed figures in yoga poses, creating lyrical compositions that explore dislocation, orientation, and the emotional dimensions of place. Across these works, narrative becomes a flexible tool—capable of holding memory, myth, humor, and transformation—reminding us that identity is always in motion, shaped by both image and experience.

Kristin Skees, Eiza June, Photograph, 2019

Christi Harris, Wedding Announcement: Swimming, Collage

Christi Harris, Wedding Announcement: Wrestling, Collage

Eliot Dudik, Alligator Alley, Oregon Road

Memory and Place

Memory and history recur as themes throughout the exhibition, often surfacing through depictions of landscape and portraiture that serve as vessels for personal and cultural reflection. Photographer Eliot Dudik is represented here by Alligator Alley—a brooding, panoramic view of a Florida roadway that slices through wetlands and sky. The horizon feels distant and uncertain, the composition both expansive and constrained. More emblematic of Dudik’s long-term investigation into the layered histories of American terrain than his well-known eclipse diptychs, Alligator Alley reflects on how infrastructure intersects with wilderness, and how place can simultaneously suggest progress, abandonment, and memory. It’s a landscape loaded with contradiction—a kind of psychological map that encourages viewers to consider the weight of history embedded in the built environment.

Vanessa Briscoe Hay and Sandra-Lee Phipps extend this dialogue in a different register with Phipps’ Lessons in Survival series—intimate portrait photographs rooted in decades of friendship and shared creative life. Hay, best known as the vocalist for the influential post-punk band Pylon, brings a performative and expressive sensibility to the portraits, while Phipps, a photographer and educator, offers a deeply observational lens. Their collaboration is grounded in mutual trust and layered history, each image functioning as both a documentation and a lived exchange. The series draws on pop-cultural identity, Southern artistic lineage, and personal mythology to create portraits that feel at once private and emblematic. Within the context of Habitation, their work suggests that memory is not only preserved through image, but continually reactivated through relationship—through the gestures, expressions, and creative acts that carry the past forward.

Sandra-Lee Phipps, I *Told Him These Things I'm Telling You Now From Lessons in Survival series, Jennifer*

Elizabeth Mead, Untitled Williamsburg 09, 2018-19 Photograph (bottom) and Elizabeth Mead, Untitled Williamsburg 10, 2018-19 Photograph (top)

Abstraction and Materiality

Elizabeth Mead constructs small sculptures from cut and folded paper, then photographs those forms so that light, shadow, and edge become her vocabulary of abstraction. The resulting images, alongside the paper objects themselves, evoke memory, presence, and the tension between what is seen and sensed through delicate shifts in surface, balance, and spatial rhythm. Greenspring, her pinhole photograph of trees in a local marsh, extends this inquiry into the natural world—blurring the boundary between observed landscape and sculptural composition. Mead’s long-standing engagement with perception, shaped in part by her background in philosophy and choreography, is evident in the quiet rigor of her forms and the meditative stillness of her images.

In dialogue with Mead’s work, Benjamin Rouse employs measured intervals and quiet repetitions to create minimalist fields whose subtle energy rewards sustained, attentive looking. His blind-embossed works push the limits of visibility, requiring viewers to adjust their pace and perspective in order to detect the slow rhythms of line, pressure, and space. Rouse’s compositions—often built from grids, marks, or understated patterning—hover between structure and atmosphere. Their restraint is not emptiness, but a kind of distilled presence: a space where touch, time, and perception are calibrated into finely tuned experiences of attention.

Benjamin Rouse, *Traces*, Blind embossed wove paper, 17x22, 2023 and Benjamin Rousem, Harmony, Blind embossed Kitakata paper

Grayson Chandler *Tidepool II,* 2024, Watercolor on paper, 13.5 × 10 (left) and *Migrations*, 2024 , Watercolor, Gouache, and Acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 Inches (right)

Grayson Chandler’s radiant watercolors expand the language of abstraction, letting saturated color fields and fluid contours envelop the viewer in a visceral, instinct-driven experience. His compositions often suggest landscapes or organic growth without fully settling into representation, allowing perception and intuition to guide the viewing process. Chandler’s use of vibrant pigments and dynamic brushwork creates visual fields that pulse with energy, offering a kind of emotional cartography that’s felt as much as seen. Each piece invites viewers to navigate shifting relationships between color, form, and motion—engaging abstraction as an embodied encounter.

In Goldenrod, Brian Kreydatus captures the fragile architecture of a wildflower through a single monotype: a ghostly silhouette hovers in a velvety black ground, balancing botanical precision against expressive surface. Known for his figurative and observational prints, Kreydatus brings the same sensitivity to line and texture here, distilling a moment of natural clarity into a quietly charged image. The work suggests impermanence—an ephemeral bloom suspended in darkness—underscoring how even the most delicate forms can leave a lasting visual impression when rendered with care and restraint.

Heather Beardsley embroiders delicate “growths” onto found photographs and everyday objects, imagining speculative ecologies that overtake the familiar. Her hybrid practice merges drawing, thread, and object-based work to transform domestic or documentary imagery into eerie, organic landscapes. Rooted in environmental science and informed by residencies across Europe and Asia, Beardsley’s work draws attention to ecological precarity and the resilience of natural systems. In her stitched interventions, invasive flora becomes both metaphor and warning: a sign of nature’s persistence and its unpredictable response to human disruption.

Taken together, these artists keep attention fixed on the grain of paper, the viscosity of pigment, and the softness of fiber—reminding us that material decisions drive both visual impact and conceptual depth. Their works call not only to the eye, but to the hand and the body, inviting viewers to reflect on how process and form shape meaning in contemporary practice.

Heather Beardsley, *Strange Plants, Chicago*, 2023, Gel pen on found photograph10 1/2 × 7 1/2 in | 26.7 × 19.1 cm

A Cohesive Community

Although each artist speaks in a distinct visual language, together they present a unified conversation about storytelling, identity, and the shifting meanings of material culture. Installation / Works on Paper 2023 balances broad appeal with intellectual depth: its vivid imagery draws visitors in, while the ideas and meticulous craftsmanship reward sustained attention. As curator John Lee Matney notes, the exhibition “celebrates the authenticity of the artist community that we support.”

Across disciplines—printmaking, photography, collage, watercolor, and mixed media—the artists engage paper not as a passive surface but as a site of experimentation, reflection, and transformation. The show charts a range of emotional and conceptual registers: from social commentary and historical memory to dreamlike symbolism, abstraction, and quiet acts of care.

Moving through the exhibition—whether pausing before an abstract wash of color, studying a collaged photograph, or tracing the embossed stillness of a blind print—viewers take part in a dialogue that bridges styles, geographies, and generations. The exhibition invites everyone to share in that exchange, discovering fresh links between art, memory, and imagination, while underscoring the vitality of voices both within and beyond the American South. In returning to the theme that launched the gallery’s very first show, Installation / Works on Paper 2023 affirms paper’s enduring power—not only as a material, but as a space where artistic vision continues to unfold.

Robert Brown, Beaver Ruin, Etching and Photogravure

installation/ Works on Paper