Everything is Fine Starting Now is a two-person show featuring new works by Laura Berger and Sandra Fettingis. Friends from Chicago, Laura and Sandra have collaborated from afar to create a colorful installation to include type, patterns, and characters. These elements subtly nod at themes of energy, communication, and the creation of one’s essential mantras. However, the exhibition is conceptually centered around the notion of “release,” and each artist explored these ideas through their own work; in their own style.
Laura’s illustrative gouache and acrylic paintings on paper and wood explore these themes of release and connection to each other and our environment through the use of a cast of created characters, smatterings of pattern, and textual elements. She is interested in exploring the nature of being a human attempting to navigate life as best we can, in all of its confusing and mysterious corners. Her work is focused on how we find true connection with each other, ourselves, and our environments, particularly as we each adapt differently to our current era when true face-to-face connection is becoming more rare. She is personally influenced by eastern philosophy, the sincere wish to live for the moment with an open heart, and seeking happiness and gratitude in the details.
Sandra’s wall sculptures, made of wood, styrene, paper, and paint also elicits these themes through material and process. The drippy pattern work demonstrates visual release; patterns behave like mantras through their effective repetition. This body of work also exhibit the artist’s transition into slightly larger, more dense works and installation, a release of her former ways of relating to the viewer. Thick layering of styrene which alternate shapes and sizes reminisces the fluidity and flexibility one must demonstrate during periods of transition. These aspects of her work are new and experimental; as she delves into release she discovers elements of her own self that she can now communicate through this exhibition.