February 2022 Digital Catalogue

Refrigerator Poetry’s February 2022 Exhibition features artwork completed within the last year by twelve national and international artists. Refrigerator Poetry can be defined as a multiplicity of voices united by time. This is not a group show in the typical sense but more of a collaborative presentation. Each piece carries a unique personal and social charge, intuitiveness, and emotional authenticity.

The online exhibition, organized by the Archive Director and co-founder Perri Neri, offers a conversation between artists who broadly range in their formal approaches and in the memories they summon. It takes courage to create something. Fearlessness. What compels the artist to go to unknown places? To find that shape or form that says 'this is how it feels to be me in this space, in this time.'

Artists Nichole Gronvold Roller and Gerri Rachins occupy an elusive realm where illusionism and geometric abstraction merge in a dynamic but uneasy tension. Jo Ann Rothschild records circumstances of pandemic life with fragile and faint hashmarks like a repeating mantra. Mark T. Wright's drawing is a rhythmic arrangement that unfurls subtle variations in pattern and symmetry. Susi Raphael's figurative gestures walk out from her canvas in full command. The materiality of Rita Holcberg's painting is as if she has turned the view from her São Paulo studio window into a liquid landscape. Susan Barrett's pure visual pleasure of color and radiant palette feels nostalgic and re-centers our wanderlust. Mary Zeran and Hollis Hildebrand-Mills use painterly devices - expressive, fresh and vibrant broad strokes while Vian Borchert embraces a decidedly all-over and delicate compositional ethos. Under a framework of steel girders, Regina Walker gifts us with the upward gaze of a vanished time.

Participating Artists: Susan Barrett, Vian Borchert, Nichole Gronvold Roller, Hollis Hildebrand-Mills, Rita Holcberg, Perri Neri, Gerri Rachins, Susi Raphael, Jo Ann Rothschild, Regina Walker,
Mark T. Wright, and Mary Zeran