05/16/2026
Made a visit to today to pay a visit to the friendly founder Andres Guerrero. On view is Michelle Grabner’s show “Trautes Heim,” German for “home sweet home.” I like to get to know a bit about artists when I spend time with their work. Grabner’s a mom, teacher, and curator. I learned she is very generous with her time as an educator and emphasizes the importance of community especially among young artists.
Her work has always involved a lot of tedious handmade processes (she finds a lot artistic productivity in the actual physical work) to create familiar objects taken from domestic, suburban life. It is what she’s interested in evaluating and exploring: domestic life, labor, the everyday. How we value it, our relationship with it, our critique of it, our conventions surrounding it. Domestic life as part of life as an artist. Routine and repetition in daily work as equivalent to routine and repetition in producing creative work.
The brooms are bronze, the cabbage and potatoes realist ceramics. Cornflakes and saltines imagery give nostalgia and reference to mass scale and production.
Her works is fun and familiar…midwest roots, building with materials to replicate physical nature. Like as a dentist I seek to rebuild teeth to a certain aesthetic level, she builds illusions—objects that are thought to be something they are not by paying attention to detail and nuance. It’s always the goal to painstakingly work to trick the viewer into thinking the smile you’re seeing before you is perfectly real. There’s a lot of process involved, but at the end of the day, to achieve the best results you simply have to love doing the thing, the challenge, the craft.
On view until…tomorrow.
