Exhibition Runs: March 7 – April 14, 2022
Community Celebration: Saturday April 2nd, 4:30pm – 6:30pm
Harwood Art Center and Escuela del Sol Montessori are pleased to present Encompass, a unique all ages art celebration that takes place annually. This year Encompass features three gallery exhibitions, hands-on art making projects, live music, food trucks, and activities for all ages. Encompass is both a reflection of and an offering to our community. In 2022 our theme is (re)conceive: works of reclamation and highlights artists that deconstruct and reconstruct notions of social order – particularly investigating norms of domesticity, building spaces of comfort, and redefining what, and who, is home.
Community Celebration
Encompass is Harwood’s capstone celebration for the year. We invite everyone to this free event as we come together in community! You are invited to an Exhibition Reception on Saturday, April 2nd from 4:30-6:30pm at Harwood Art Center.
Masks are optional for the reception, but encouraged indoors. All of the featured Encompass exhibitions will be displayed March 7 – April 14, 2022 at Harwood Art Center. Harwood’s galleries are open Wednesday and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. For more information and current policies please visit www.harwoodartcenter.org.
Public Gallery Hours
This exhibition is installed in our galleries and is open to view by the public on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10am-2pm.
Splish Splash
An exhibition born out of a mutual affinity for the quiet stillness shared with oneself in a bath featuring Caitlin Carcerano and Charis Fleshner.
Splish Splash combines Caitlin’s paintings with Charis’s drop-shaped interactive soft sculptures in a bathtub that viewers are invited to play with. There’s a tension with vulnerability in bathtubs; the bather is in a position where they are very exposed, but simultaneously feeling safe, calm, taken care of, and even healed. It is brave thing to want to address and share this vulnerability. We are making the private public and inviting people into this space. Juxtaposing paintings, with their rich history of non-tactility, against interactive soft sculpture creates another point of tension. We aim to take fine art constructs and break those down by inviting viewers to interact with certain pieces in the show.
About Caitlin
Caitlin Carcerano is a painter who lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her paintings exist as moments in time that are part of a larger, overarching narrative, like a panel in a graphic novel. In her most recent work, bathtubs serve as a place where she can explore her relationship with vulnerability and the tension between feeling secure and feeling exposed.
About Charis
Charis Fleshner is a mixed media artist who lives and works in northern Colorado. Her studio practice centers around play, tactility, and craftivism. Her most recent work involves interactive soft sculpture. Charis has been an art educator for over a decade and her experiences with children influence the way she approaches the gallery space and its historical constructs. She views bringing play and serendipity into the gallery space as a political act.
Artist Statement
Neither Caitlin Carcerano nor Charis Fleshner are afraid of the personal and the tension vulnerability can bring into a public space. Though they work in two different mediums, both Caitlin and Charis embrace softness and a color palette that is unguarded and bright. Viewers are invited to explore their own ability to become vulnerable themselves. Combining painting and interactive soft sculpture creates many different entry points to experience the exhibition from. They also seek to push back against the notion that softness and vulnerability are exclusively feminine characteristics in a patriarchal society.