Reclaimed Realities - Assemblage Artists Exhibit

November 6th - January 22nd

Reclaimed Realities: What we keep—and what we throw away—shapes the stories we tell about ourselves. Reclaimed Realities gathers artists—Jorge Garza, Jeanie Sanders, Ward Sanders, Craig Bunch, Ian Eskander, and Jon Hinojosa—who work in the deep tradition of the readymade and assemblage, from Duchamp’s audacious selection to Kurt Schwitters’s Merz constellations, Joseph Cornell’s poetic boxes, Louise Nevelson’s shadowed altars, and the charged social meanings carried forward by artists like Betye Saar and Noah Purifoy. Their materials—weathered wood, cast-off hardware, cabinet drawers, book remnants, typography, textile scraps—arrive already inscribed with time. Through acts of choosing, juxtaposing, and fixing, these fragments are edited into new worlds.

Together the artists treat the studio like an archaeology lab and a repair shop. Garza, Belisle, Peters, Hurd, Sanders, Bunch, and Stein transform the vernacular debris of daily life into reliquaries, small architectures, and narrative instruments—objects that feel at once intimate and civic. In their hands, the readymade becomes less a provocation than a proposal: that matter remembers. Each work restores use-value to the overlooked, turns refuse into reference, and folds ecology, history, and personal memory into visual form. Reclaimed Realities invites viewers to read surfaces as archives and to recognize that the city’s afterlives—its sheds, alleys, flea markets, and workbenches—can be maps for imagining a more resourceful, humane future.

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