Current Exhibition
Marianne Desmarais, Sarah Kabot, & Liz Sargent: gentle as a breath
Exhibition Dates: May 9 - June 7, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, May 9, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours Sat. & Sun. 12-5pm
This show comes from a simple invitation to reconstitute physical proximity. It assembles works on paper, woven sculpture, and bell forms by longtime collaborators who have continued to work together, across distances, throughout their professional careers. It honors both the gathering and the dispersal—a sustained perceptual openness that draws in then moves outward; gentle as a breath.
Each artist follows her own path while twining threads of shared interest across personal experimentation. Being in the same room is a fundamental way to commune, benefitting from the parallel play of a joint showing of our individual work.
Kabot’s drawings on translucent film, representations of newspaper clippings, pull focus from the specific detail of Ben-Day dots to constitute an emerging picture of real events. When viewed from a distance, the detailed renderings refer to terrestrial locations, and on close viewing, to the cosmos, flickering through scale and time. They achieve a pointed singularity before populating our collective memory. These images linger in the mind’s eye as they dissolve at the edges.
Simultaneously, Sargent’s sculptural works assemble and disassemble in diaphanous forms, each piece expanding into the air of the gallery. Constructed of filaments pulled from natural materials, the sculptures are drawn together in painted lines out of thin air. Color becomes a material, natural, fabricated, diluted, and entangled. Succumbing to gravity, lines wind into rope coils that accumulate as if left by a receding tide.
Around the gallery, Desmarais positions bells cast in porcelain and bronze that move between materiality, form, and sound. They invoke multiple ways of sensing, to be seen, to be touched, to be heard. Bells slip through the body and through memory to ring a cascade of emotional tones. Like language, bells amplify experience as markers of meaning; at once solid and atmospheric.
Counterpoint to the frame or lens through which one might look, these unbounded works exist in states of dispersal and suspension. Together in the gallery space, each work takes its own time to coalesce and to dissolve.
For more information, please contact marianne.desmarais@gmail.com or 504-914-8355
Connections: Staple Goods 10th Anniversary Exhibition Catalog
Exhibition catalog commemorates the collective’s 10th anniversary exhibition, Connections (May 2021), and is available for $5.
Curated by Laura Richens. Text by Amy Mackie. Book Design by Tiffany Lin. Printed at Paper Machine.
Participating Artists: Minka/Thomasine, Aaron Collier, Robyn Denny, William DePauw, Abe Geasland, Daniel Kelly IV, Kristina Knipe, J Knoblach, Norah Lovell, Kaori Maeyama, Anne Nelson, Jack Niven, Laura Richens, Cynthia Scott, Sadie Sheldon, Lorna Williams