The Narrows Center for the Arts is pleased to present You Are Here, a group exhibition featuring works by Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, Joanna Booth, Khwanchira (Nual) Chindamanee, Elizabeth Ferrill, Rigo Flores, Lois Harada, Genevieve Lowe, Ouiji Morris, Jacoub Reyes, Julia Samuels, Kris Samuelson, Beth Sutherland, and Amanda Thackray. The artists in this exhibition examine our relationships to the spaces we inhabit, how we shape them, and how they shape us. We are the places we build; and the land, our structures, and the objects we hold close change and mold who we are. From representational landscapes to conceptual interpretations of place, the works in this exhibition tell stories of identity, site, home, climate change, and our interwoven connection to the places we love.
Joanna Booth, Rigo Flores, Lois Harada, and Ouiji Morris draw from heritage, family histories, and community to engage spaces of resistance, resilience, and remembrance. Booth’s work explores preservation, legacy, and the sense of self embedded in the place of home. Materiality transforms themes of state violence and migration into imagined postcolonial spaces and other possible worlds in Flores’s embroidered compositions. The memorial cairns in Harada’s prints are built of intaglio mono-printed stones, each representing one death at the Japanese American incarceration camp at Poston, Arizona where her grandmother’s family was forcibly relocated in 1942. Morris’s paper apron represents a vibrant joyful community juxtaposed to a more imposing inaccessible Providence skyline.
Ecology, decolonization, and cycles of life motivate the work of Paloma BarhaughBordas, Jacoub Reyes, Amanda Thackray, and Khwanchira (Nual) Chindamanee. Barhaugh-Bordas and Reyes both use invasive species to investigate themes of migration, decolonization, and identity, creating prints using plant and human forms. Thackray explores tensions between urban landscapes and the natural world, making handmade sheets of paper with water from various sites around the world. The cycle of life, decay, and rebirth are the focus of Chindamanee’s printed objects made of handmade paper.
Climate change and it’s resulting impacts on the landscape and humanity are the focus of the works by Genevieve Lowe and Kris Samuelson. Lowe’s mixed media works act as a visual catalogue of the ghost forests remaining after the mega fires in Beaver Creek, Idaho, using imagery and cast objects to memorialize vastly altered topographies and the new stories they tell. Samuelson uses mosaic and poetry to question the practices that result in acid rain and how it changes communities. Elizabeth Ferrill, Beth Sutherland, and Julia Samuels explore liminal sites of urban and suburban life, imbuing forgotten and disregarded places with new meaning. Ferrill’s work captures the solitude of the American experience using pochoir to transform the banal into beauty. Sutherland uses shape, light, and color to illuminate the mundane in her compositions, while Samuels uses the objects in urban wastelands, to examine how nature reclaims forgotten places.
In addition to thematic resonances, the artists included in You Are Here share a commitment to the way materials and process reinforce the complexity of meaning. Mark making, layers of printing, stitching, and weaving become essential components to the exploration of site and identity shaping each work.
Please join us on September 20, 2025 from 12:00p-2:00p for a closing reception.
Image 1: Willow, Beth Sutherland
Image 2: Beaver Creek Fire 06, Genevieve Lowe
Image 3: For Generations, Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas
Image 4: The Urn, Khwanchira Chindamanee
Image 5: Eagles Clothes, Julia Samuels
Image 6: Bus Stop, Elizabeth Ferril
