Squadrivium: Opening Reception

Friday March 14th, 2025

7-11 PM

On view March 14 - April 27

Artists: Rachel Klinghoffer, Allison Reimus, Lauren Rice, Kate Sable


A quadrivium is an ancient educational curriculum comprising four primary subjects: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The purpose of this educational model was not only to become more knowledgeable, but to search for unification, to uncover a potential higher consciousness while investigating the mysteries of order. Within the abstract paintings included in this exhibition, one can identify various motifs that unexpectedly allude to topics in the quadrivium. For instance, there are constellations of innumerable dots, triangles, diamonds as well as complex, oddball shapes that escape easy recognition. There are stitched, chromatic grids containing hidden text and repetitive elements, either painted or assembled, that are buried inside shallow spatial fields. There are accumulating patterns and defiant, cutout voids. When the works of these four artists are placed side by side, the visual cacophonies reflect and echo, recalling a makeshift band of wayward instruments, borrowing each other's parts, forming unplanned harmonies, while refusing to stay in key. A shared visual phenomenon in these artists’ work is the use of the rectangle. Acknowledging the four-sided frame as a common thread in a show of paintings may seem obvious, but it bears emphasis as each of these artists uses the rectilinear structure not only to contain, but to push against. The rectangle exists in these artists' work as a structure to prod, poke, tickle, layer, cut, embellish and encompass. While often containing disguised textual arrangements (Reimus), somewhat recognizable, anthropomorphized elements (Sable) or remnants of the physical world (Klinghoffer, Reimus and Rice), the paintings sit firmly in the realm of abstraction. The paintings made by these artist-mothers are evidence of the body, providing proof of labor–hours of cutting, stitching, layering, looking, longing. They are constructed sites of display within which to embed practical and sentimental ephemera. There is a physicality to all of the work–it is at once surface and object, shallow and deep, solid and porous, earthbound and enigmatic. The paintings’ boundaries are also deceptive. They call into question the secondary nature of the wall, the functional use of an object like a paintbrush or a shoelace–the practical becomes decoration, and vice versa. This fellowship was created pre-motherhood. While each embarked on a journey into artist-motherhood with few role models, they formed and transformed identities parallel to one another. After more than 15 years of professional artistic practice, they continue to push against the edges, disrupting hierarchical structures, creating work that is soft, vulnerable, caring, available, obsessive, sentimental and laborious.