Amy Hughes Braden /// Madeleine LeMieux
Open by appointment November 19, 2021 – January 14, 2022
Basement: Amy Hughes Braden graduated from the Corcoran College of Art & Design (R.I.P.) in 2011 and maintained an active studio practice and exhibition schedule in Washington DC until moving to St. Louis City summer of 2021. A few professional highlights include: DC Commission on Arts & Humanities Fellowships (2017-2020), numerous projects with Transformer (DC), and creating and running Artist Mother Studio (AMS), a project to support artist-caregivers. AMS has provided studio space, childcare, and stipends to three cohorts of artists, and in partnership with Washington Project for the Arts produced an Artist/Caregiver conference, and publication called Maternal Journal in 2018. The second issue of Maternal Journal was produced and printed with Project for Empty Space (Newark, NJ) and is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Library collection.
About her work Braden writes:
I gather up the constantly flowing debris of my domestic parent life. These are my primary materials which I meld with glue, slime, resin and paper pulp into bulbous shapes called Blobs. Examples include: empty hand sanitizer bottles, old curtain rings, broken sunglasses, baby tylenol syringes, all manner of packaging and packing related trash, fabrics too worn to re-circulate, cloth diapers, prescription bottles, broken glass, plastic bits.
Knowing individual actions alone won’t save the planet, this process is better framed as futile atonement, or for the optimistic, as an offering of repair, perhaps to take responsibility for the consequences of presence.
Material is paramount in the work, the documents I shred to make the paper pulp are as important as the slime that drips from the pulp blobs. Glitter, cheap jewels, precious gems, and the contents of the studio dustpan are bedazzled onto the blobs. Through craft methods the pre-teen artist’s hand is present and validated. I’m interested in parsing the ways in which girly/youthful pursuits are deemed kitschy, low-brow or unprofessional. I take up puffy paint and slime as rebuttal. The pile of blobs accumulates infinitely, as the faucet of material debris does not shut off.
Living Room: Madeleine Marie LeMieux (b. 1982, Chicago) lives and works in Columbia, Missouri. She received a BFA with an emphasis in Art History, Theory and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, a MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University in 2011 and a MFA in Painting from the University of Missouri in 2021. She has been exhibiting her artwork and using art as a tool for community organizing since 2004.
LeMieux has founded and directed two experimental emerging artists spaces: OAO Galleria in Chicago, IL from 2004-2007, and the non-profit gallery and residency program, Resident Arts in Columbia, MO from 2014-2020. Her work has been exhibited in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, and Virtually; and will be featured in New American Paintings, Midwest Edition #155 in 2022.
She is currently working as the Art on the Move Coordinator and as Adjunct Faculty in the Painting and Drawing, and Arts Administration departments for the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri.
