Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present our first exhibition of 2025, Postdiluvian. The exhibition features work by 20 artists living and working in Western North Carolina, and is co-curated by Asheville based artist, curator, and educator Erika Diamond. Join us for a Reception for the Artists Friday, January 31 from 6-8PM.
By the time of the exhibition’s opening, it will have been four months since Helene ravaged our region. There are still remnants everywhere, from the minuscule to the catastrophic. Most conversation still revolve in some way around the storm, and it’s difficult to convey our spectrum of emotions to those outside the region. Many of our gallery artists and others in our arts community lost decades worth of work from flooded studios, homes, and galleries. Many artists find themselves unable to make work about anything else, while many find themselves unable to make work at all. This exhibition addresses these complexities, and the pieces on view were all made in reaction to, were recovered from, or became newly relevant in the wake of the flood. Ultimately, Postdiluvian reflects on recovery, resilience, and the enduring strength of community.
Work by: Rob Amberg, Tom Ashcraft, DeWayne Barton, Mike Belleme, Brandon Boan, Eric William Carroll, Erin E. Castellan, Colby Caldwell, Hannah Cole, Margaret Curtis, Georgia Deal + Holly Hill, Erika Diamond, Mira Gerard, James Henkel, Chris Jehly, Rachel Meginnes, Peter Glenn Oakley, Tema Stauffer, & Kimberly Thomas.
10% of proceeds from sales will be donated to the Community Foundation and the Center for Craft’s Craft Futures Fund: WNC Recovery.
Brandon Boan’s series of scrolls are thermal drawings made on heat reactive paper. Pinches of found clay help form images that consider materiality and conditions of environmental maintenance. His clay sculptures are impressions formed within the constraints of found containers, buckets, food packaging, and baggies — each fired into newly synthesized impressions of those objects.
The pre-flood oil on canvas work History Painting (for B.N.) by Hannah Cole is about texture and grime, elements now exaggerated by its flooded surface, through bubbled paint and river mud. An old painting underneath was additionally revealed by the water damage, its blue sky now peeking through.
Mira Gerard’s landscapes, salvaged from second floor flood water, highlight the immersive rosy glow of the mountains of Western North Carolina and are an homage to loss and love.
Watercolor work by Chris Jehly documents with mesmerizing urgency the ravaged and now unfamiliar landscape; the painted images emerge like the rubble itself, both recognizable and falling into visual limbo.
Kimberly Thomas' flame-worked glass sculptures find new context among these works. They echo the piles and messes left behind in Helene's wake, with each tiny object representing the complicated lives of individual people experiencing both hardship and hope.