Knockout Gorgeous

Photographs by Beth Mikalonis

Knockout Gorgeous
January 12 – July 9, 2024

Gracelee Lawrence, Sarah Lutz, Amelia Toelke

This exhibition takes its title after one of Amelia Toelke’s paintings, The Best, in which a series of superlatives are linked together as one long, exuberant charm necklace. Based on the familiar script jewelry that declares fortunes and aspirations, Toelke’s invented chain bestows every empowering quality upon the wearer. There is a jeweler’s sensibility to the meticulousness of all three artists’ work; to their deftness with pattern and detail, sumptuous color palettes, and consideration of the boundary between ornament and nature. Gracelee Lawrence’s sculptures are seductively smooth, opalescent, and symmetrical. On closer inspection, these compositions reveal a hybrid union of animal, human and botanical parts that are beautifully, and inextricably connected. Likewise, Sarah Lutz’ paintings allude to places or features of the world that seem familiar, but are so transformed as to occupy their own reality. Clusters drift and pile, translucent and aglow, around formations and forces that echo what we might imagine at the bottom of the sea, or deep inside our own cellular systems. While on their surface, the works in this exhibit are visibly gorgeous, the artists are also occupied with questions about the transformative power of the body – and our human identity – through patterns of nature and inventions of adornment.