Site Aperture brought together four women artists working in a variety of practices and materials to respond to—and even invade—the traditional gallery space. Each artist was presented with particular areas to inhabit with newly commissioned, site-specific installations: the ceiling, the floor, the wall, and the space in between.

Mariah Anne Johnson uses folded, composed, and stacked vintage fabrics in layered installations to raise questions of narrative, memory, and domestic life. She responds to a site by building off of the raw space with colorful bed sheets. In Station Fire, she built her stacks around architectural elements of the gallery, while activated the ceiling as an underexposed area.

Margaret Boozer collects local earth for her sculptural works, arranging the material in a way that engages the viewer in the history of the elements and clay’s physical properties. In Line Drawing, Boozer sourced materials from a local construction site to represent the soil strata with a 59-foot-long line of sandy soil, mounds of mud, pyrite chunks, and logs of prehistoric wood as a linear translation of what exists below the gallery’s floor.

Talia Greene is fascinated by our relationships with the natural world and, especially, insects, which can permeate a controlled environment while retaining structure. For the exhibition, Greene created Decomposition/Recomposition, a decorative wallpaper that has been overrun with images of ants that collectively carry away fragments of the design. Greene placed Colony (Bostwick), a vintage portrait swarmed with depictions of flies, atop the wallpaper, while also extending the ant invasion into the gallery on paper strips, titled Weaver Colony.

Mia Feuer’s Rebirth hovered in the empty space, composed of papier-mâché and cardboard forms covered with black wax. Feuer’s suspended columns were topped with snarling jackal heads that descended in a tense, spiral cluster from the ceiling. The work reflected Feuer’s experiences in Egypt amid Tahrir Square protests and Post-Mubarak Cairo, as well as her encounters with figures of Anubis (the jackal-headed god of the deceased) in Pharaonic tombs.

Cover Image: Installation of Site Aperture.

Photos: Brandon Webster.