Refrigerator Poetry Winter 2024 offers a conversation between artists who broadly range in their formal approaches and in the memories they summon. Through subtle connections, eight artists offer eight variations on abstraction, from hard-edge geometry to expressionistic disorder. Wit, charm, and emotional resonance propel their stories, and vivify the places or temporalities that we cannot access in any other way other than through art.

Vian Borchert paints as if it’s a cloudy day, but she never forgets the luminescent sun. These charming watercolors call to mind Rilke’s letters, specifically the descriptions of landscapes he wrote to Clara Westhoff when they were apart.  Operating at the intersection of vision and language, art and technology, and everyday life, Leslie Ford’s imagination during periods of isolation is significant, as is the exploration of humanity while photographing Victorian flatware.  With a commitment to color and pattern, Lynette Haggard imagines how the memories embedded in worn fabrics can fold and slip into each other, becoming the material and palette for a new body of work.  Pawel Jezak expresses a singular moment of human emotion in the juxtaposition of collective narratives of newspaper articles – a visual intervention of consumer culture.

The self-portraiture of Lisa Noble takes us straight to an arrangement of facts, thrusting a rhythm of pattern onto canvas – a flowing, vibrating symbolic immediacy. More important is the artist’s touch. It is how true memory is ingrained in us and becomes vibrant!  Gerri Rachins makes visible the otherwise invisible subjects and their inner lives in her masterly painted abstractions – a spectrum of human emotions including despondency, hope, and empathy. Nichole Gronvold Roller’s Gem Series are highly articulated geometric abstract compositions that force the eye to take its time as it journeys across the surfaces of domestic spaces.

Artists: Vian Borchert, Leslie Ford, Lynette Haggard, Pawel Jezak, Lisa Noble, Gerri Rachins, and Nichole Gronvold Roller.