Opening reception in the gallery of solo exhibition by Guen Montgomery Reasonable Doubts.

PLUS we will be hosting Open Artists Studios

+ Featured Printmaker Sage Perrott HAYPEEP in the Community Printshop!

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REASONABLE DOUBTS

Mary Oliver told us to let the soft animals of our bodies love what they love.

What if you’re always a minute away from losing the thing your animal body loves? In inferential cognitive behavior therapy, patients are asked to learn to recognize the difference between reasonable doubts and obsessive doubts. The inferential part of this therapy approach addresses the tendency to make up the wrong story from unreasonable doubts and run away with it. To make faulty inferences. After completing the workbook, I can assure you that all my doubts are reasonable.

This exhibition of recent works by Guen Montgomery privileges feeling and touching: feeling as an affectual state, the haptic need to feel as orientation, and as “feeling your way through” – a way of navigating in unsettled times. Touch refers to the touch of ink to paper, or the longing to touch that comes from seeing an animal’s fur and feeling it resonate with some uncontrollable mammal part of you. Reasonable Doubts is about being a person-animal-mother in the current polycrisis.

Guen Montgomery

Bio

Guen Montgomery is an artist and performer whose work investigates identity through studies of material culture, gender, and family mythology. Montgomery’s work is located in the tactile intersections between printmaking, performance, and sculpture. Montgomery has exhibited nationally and internationally and has work in public collections including the Centre for Art and Design in Churchill Australia, and Mushashino Art University, Tokyo, Japan. She’s completed multiple residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center and Stove Works residencies. Within the last year, Montgomery has exhibited in solo and two-person exhibitions, most recently at the Janet Turner Print Museum in Chico, CA and SNAP Gallery in Edmonton, Canada. An Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Illinois, Montgomery lives in Urbana with her wife, daughter, a patient dog, and two elderly cats.

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Sage Perrott, aka Haypeep, is a printmaker and educator originally from West Virginia. Her artwork features grumpy, lumpy, ghost-like creatures situated in cramped, often humorous circumstances. Perrott especially enjoys screenprinting and riso. She has degrees in printmaking from West Virginia University (BFA) and from Ohio University (MFA). Perrott is currently an Associate Professor teaching printmaking at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, TN. Her prints, drawings, and zines have found their way into the hands of folks all over the United States and the world.