alter/altar

amber eve anderson, douglas luman, ashley pastore

on view through november 12, 2022

Amber Eve Anderson, Douglas Luman, and Ashley Pastore explore how everyday objects conjure nostalgic, emotional, or other affective associations. We fill our domestic environs with altars—from casual ephemera to elaborate displays—where we enact rituals, consciously or not. Through strategies of accumulation and repetition, Anderson, Luman, and Pastore alter ordinary objects to become altars of memory and desire.

Installation Views

Amber Eve Anderson

Exhibition wall text: Occasions for Something Useless and related sculptures on view feature eclectic assortments of found objects belonging to the artist, including gifts, purchases and sentimental possessions. Amber Eve Anderson arranges the objects on foam mattress toppers, surfaces that suggest both the domestic sphere and comfort– physical or emotional. A text written in the style of an online product review accompanies each sculpture, in which the artist rates one of the objects. Occasions for Something Useless takes its title from Anderson’s review of vintage snack plates, a gift from her grandmother. The plates remain hidden inside a cardboard box, a testament to the fact that they have never been used: the box retains an original purchase receipt and the plates still have price stickers. Yet Anderson’s grandmother never discarded the plates, and as a result the artist feels obligated to keep them. While objects on the mattresses have varying levels of sentimental value—dried flowers to celebrate an anniversary, wrapping paper from the artist’s childhood home—others are purchased from Amazon or targeted Instagram advertisements. By recounting a gift from her grandmother in the style of a product review, Anderson implicitly asks whether our values, tastes, and desires are filtered through the internalized language of consumerism.

Amber Eve Anderson is a conceptual artist whose work explores the way one’s surroundings relate to their identity and behavior. She received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, where she continues to live and work. She has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Her most recent solo exhibition at Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, D.C. was reviewed by the Washington Post. Amber has received funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, and the Maryland State Arts Council. She has been an Arts Writer at Bmore Art and founded Ctrl+P, a publishing project dedicated to preserving ephemeral interventions in the digital realm.

Ashley Pastore

Exhibition wall text: Ritual 1990-92 is a paper quilt comprising Pennsylvania lottery tickets purchased by the artist’s grandfather, Gordon Zimmerman, over a period of two years. Zimmerman passed in 1994, before he could retire from decades of work in American manufacturing. Only later did his family discover the thousands of lottery tickets that Zimmerman saved. Ashley Pastore sewed the tickets together, forming a monumental altar to a family member and his daily lived ritual. Likewise, the artist honors her grandfather’s impulse to save the tickets by transforming daily ephemera into a sculpture and family heirloom. The scale of Ritual 1990-92 suggests the aggregate impact of seemingly insignificant routines: they imbue life with order and purpose. The staggering accumulation of lottery tickets reflects a widely felt desire for freedom—financial and otherwise—from the mandate to work. The accompanying photograph depicts Gordon Zimmerman and fellow members of United Auto Workers Local 832 in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Ashley Pastore is an artist based in Erie, Pennsylvania. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus in Printmaking and New Media. Recently her work was featured in Everyday Monumental, a solo exhibition at the Erie Art Museum. Her work is on permanent display in Chicago’s Union Station and Cleveland’s Downtown Hilton Hotel. Ashley has exhibited around the country in Chicago, Austin, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Albuquerque. After receiving her graduate degree she was hired as the Print shop technician at the historical Ox Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI, and has most recently taught at SUNY Fredonia in the Printmaking department. Ashley is currently building the communal printshop and makerspace, Grounded Printshop in Erie.

Douglas Luman

Exhibition wall text: A Power Word (a working) draws upon various cultural, religious, and individual beliefs in language’s capacity for magic. Upon entering the darkened gallery, visitors encounter an invitation to speak their intention. The room then responds to the spoken intention with a power word. Derived from an invented language loosely based on the Latin phonetic alphabet, the power word becomes an incantation to manifest the original intention. Once bestowed on a visitor, the power word enters a projected word cloud, an ongoing visualization of the room’s memory and the collective desires of its visitors. A Power Word (a working) was developed using Python and Javascript, as well as the following open source software libraries or platforms (all used under the MIT open source license): aiohttp, asyncio, jQuery, PortAudio, sounddevice, vosk.

Douglas Luman is a multi-disciplinary artist and digital human based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Douglas received their MFA from George Mason University. They are the co-founder of Container, art director at Stillhouse Press, and head researcher at appliedpoetics.org. Douglas is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Allegheny College, and the author of two books: The F Text (Inside the Castle, 2017), and Rationalism (Sublunary Editions, 2021).