A group exhibition curated by Liz Stringer 

Featuring: Billy Frolov, Bianca MacPherson, Cara Rae Joven,

Lela Shahrzad Welch, Laura Stinger and Joshua Thomen

Karaoke: Saturday, December 19, 8-11 PM

Happy Hours: Friday, December 11, 5-8 PM | Friday, January 8, 5-8 PM

Decoration and ornamentation offer pleasure through their richness of color, form, and complexity, yet they have occupied a contested position within modern and contemporary art. From Adolf Loos's famous association of ornament with crime to conceptual art's dematerialization of the object, embellishment has often been treated as secondary to artistic meaning. Yet the material world of everyday life—its objects, adornments, and rituals—remain inseparable from the body, shaping the psychological landscapes through which we experience ourselves and others. To ornament is also to make a public declaration of attachment, insisting that what we cherish deserves visibility, recognition, and a place within our shared cultural life.

So Fiercely Loved: Ornamentation and Decoration brings together six contemporary artists whose practices investigate ornamentation as a language of psychological expression, cultural memory, and personal transformation. This exhibition features Billy Frolov, Bianca MacPherson, Cara Rae Joven, Lela Shahrzad Welch, Laura Stinger, and Joshua Thomen. 

Taking the historical Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement as a point of departure, So Fiercely Loved revisits the relationship between decorative practices and hierarchies of artistic, cultural, and social value. While P&D challenged distinctions between contemporary art and craft, this exhibition considers how ornamentation extends beyond questions of aesthetic legitimacy/the surface to become an active process through which psychological worlds, inherited histories, and imagined futures are brought into being.

We are adorned by the very systems that bind us, as decorative practices bring disparate scales of experience into material contact. Through painting, ceramics, sculpture, and mixed media, the participating artists materialize unseen entanglements between spiritual agency, ecological and technological infrastructures, cultural inheritance, and political identity. Joshua Thomen draws upon the aesthetics of cuteness, everyday charms, and spiritual traditions, transforming stuffed animals into guardians that complicate relationships of protection, dependence, and care. Laura Stinger assembles ceramic pipes, cast desert plants, soil, and technological devices into sculptural bodies that expose the interdependence of ecological environments, digital infrastructures, and human consumption. Cara Rae Joven embodies textured fabrics, synthetic colors, and dimensional embellishments that reference Filipino ceremonial dress and colonial histories, revealing the power structures embedded within cultural identity. Across these practices, pattern and decoration do more than render invisible systems perceptible; they become active means of negotiating and reimagining the relationships between the individual and the worlds they inhabit.

The archive does not merely hold history; it has the capacity to bite back, resisting erasure, complicating inherited narratives, and making demands upon those who encounter it. Here, the tenderness of caring for memory meets the power and responsibility of deciding what survives. Lela Shahrzad Welch draws upon familial narratives and Iranian textile traditions, translating the intricate patterns of rugs, tassels, and ornamental fragments into cast and fabricated metal sculptures. Billy Frolov constructs large-scale, quilt-like paintings that unfold over the course of a year, assembling toys, stickers, and domestic imagery into diaristic records of personal experience. Bianca MacPherson transforms her sustained encounters with historical photographic archives into abstract ceramic forms, registering the psychological impressions that remain long after the initial act of looking. Across these practices, repetition, accumulation, and ornamentation position the archive as a living, mutable structure in which preservation and transformation become intertwined acts of stewardship.

Rather than removing historical and cultural specificity in pursuit of timelessness, these artists embrace the complexity and nuance of their references, allowing personal and collective histories to remain embedded within their work. Through acts of adornment, accumulation, and transformation, they reveal how we are shaped by the worlds we inherit and how, in turn, we participate in their remaking. The resulting objects are fiercely vulnerable yet enduring, carrying the tenderness of lived experience alongside the potent potential for transformation and imagined futures. Ultimately, to ornament or decorate something is to insist that it is worthy of attention, worthy of care, and worthy of a future beyond the histories it carries ▲