August 11th - September 23rd 2023
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Rooms, an exhibition of works by Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño and Michael Frechette. Both artists work with domestic interior spaces and the memories or ghosts that inhabit them.
Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño’s work explores interpersonal relationships and structures that emerge within the home. She is interested in family relationships, relationships to our belongings, and the spaces we inhabit. Her practice begins by digitally collaging drawings and photographs. She embraces the distortions that emerge from the process of layering these images and is interested in how these visual fissures parallel the way memories can fragment and blur the story. Initially her images can be easily read, but the more time you spend with them the less readable they become. Eastwood-Riaño’s website is kathleeneastwoodriano.com.
Since March 2020 Eastwood-Riaño has been working on a series of small paintings where she approaches relationships in a new way. Social distancing, virtual classes, and birthdays, watching her only sibling’s wedding, and hosting her father-in-laws funeral on Zoom, highlighted how precious connections are. This new work moves between past and present, looking across the table through still life and memory to the people who are missing. Eastwood-Riaño hopes this body of work will go beyond the personal and speak to a universal sense of connection and loss.
When Michael Frechette paints interiors, he’s looking for ghosts. The traces of the people who lived there after they move on are like portraits to him. All of these rooms in Frechette’s work are places that he is intimately familiar with, and in some cases actually built. All have stories. Frechett'e’s website is michaelfrechette.com.
Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño is a Philadelphia based artist whose paintings, drawings and installations investigate intergenerational memory and relationships.
In December of 2022, she was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Mural Arts to create a mural in response to the exhibition Matisse in the 1930’s. Eastwood-Riaño is a 2022 recipient of a Soaring Gardens Artist Residency, a 2021 grant recipient from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and a 2020-22 recipient of the Fleisher Wind Challenge Solo Exhibition. Her work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions nationally and has work held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Eastwood-Riaño received her MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and her BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She has taught as an adjunct professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, The University of the Arts, and Moore College of Art & Design. She is currently an Assistant Professor at The Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.
Michael Frechette was born in Detroit in 1965. Growing up, he watched the decline of a city that less than a century before was mostly farmland. From plowed fields and cows to boomtown workshop of the world to wasteland in 70 years. Neighborhoods, factories and skyscrapers abandoned and overgrown. The madness and magic of a city abandoned, the wonder of its stories has informed his work ever since - Frechette examines the landscape of the natural and fabricated worlds and its influence on the human experience.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
