Intersections & Diversions

Strohl Art Center, Chautauqua Institution

July 23 - August 20, 2025

These works interrogate the ways in which humans use the grid to build, organize, and connect. Using a range of both rigid and pliable materials, they suggest growth and imply the metaphorical repeating of patterns. A softness balances the collective gridwork structures through curves, glitches, and loose threads. From circuit boards to city streets, we can find connections between acts of mapping, protecting, and testing boundaries. Curated by Erika Diamond.

ARTISTS: Paolo Arao, Thomas Campbell, Lisa Corinne Davis, Kimberly English, Adam Grinovich, Peter Christian Johnson, Ellen Ramsey, Jayoung Yoon 

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Photos: Erika Diamond

Curatorial Statement:

Grids are the foundation of many structures that protect and connect us. In celebration of the frameworks that scaffold our lives, the works in this exhibition interrogate the ways in which humans use the grid to build, organize, and unite. Featuring a range of rigid and pliable materials, a collective softness balances the gridwork patterns through curves, glitches, and loose threads.

 Like a computer, the process of weaving uses a binary grid system to create complex shapes. Jayoung Yoon’s elegantly woven hair formations represent an interconnectedness between humans and the rest of the world, combining tactility with the ethereal qualities of the mind and spirit. Paolo Arao employs both crafted and re-purposed cloth in ways that connect to indigenous textile traditions of the Philippines in which “color and pattern are imbued with a spiritual, healing or protective power.” Through the lens of the American South, Kimberly English makes quilts and weavings that consider globalized labor, notions of loss, and the individual within the collective. Ellen Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to combine disparate visual languages in her handwoven tapestries that comment on big tech and rapid technological change.

 Thomas Campbell, a fifth-generation steel worker, creates the most rigid and precise of the works on view, though his grids give way to smooth arcs and dizzying optical experiences. Works by Lisa Corinne Davis and Peter Christian Johnson are deliberate disruptors to this sense of order, reminding us of the inherent (and often beautiful) chaos of the natural world. Davis’s compositions are loosely inspired by geography, maps, and urban planning, resulting in fictive maps that represent both “social and geographic mobility”. Peter Christian Johnson invites the kiln to alter his intricate porcelain grid systems, instilling a sense of aliveness into the rigid frameworks that evoke architectural skeletons. Mining larger questions around value, technology, and power, jewelry works by Adam Grinovich offer a shift in scale and consider how the body might interact more intimately with grids made of steel and cubic zirconia.

 These works are abstractions, but they recall the utilitarian latticework of daily life. They echo the patterns of our bridges, buildings, circuit boards, and clothing, whose designs ultimately bend to the needs and desires of human beings. Through the inhale and exhale of lines falling in and out of their confines, these artists draw attention to the points at which we intersect and diverge.

Special thanks to Colin Shaffer, Rena Colletti, Tracy Stum, and Lily Goodowens for assistance in exhibition install.