This spring, with our exhibition CARE (which is still available to view until July 5th) we began planting the seeds for a broader vision…
I’m excited to announce that SPAACES is extending beyond the bounds of Sarasota and Florida!
While our mission has always included fostering local creativity, CARE marked an exciting turning point. We were proud to feature the work of two remarkable artists from outside the region: Isys Hennigar (North Carolina) and Macon Reed (New York).
Their inclusion reflects our evolving commitment to engaging with diverse, national voices whose practices challenge, transform, and deepen our understanding of contemporary care, connection, and culture.
Isys Hennigar is a North Carolina based artist working in ceramics and metal. Her work invokes real and reimagined ecological encounters that underscore transformation, hybridity, and play as tools of renewal. Hennigar received her MFA from the University of Georgia and BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the 2024 recipient of the South Arts North Carolina State Fellowship, and recent exhibitions of her work include the American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), Signature Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), Sow & Tailor Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Ferrara Showman Gallery (New Orleans, LA), and the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, NC).
Braiding forms and imagery from agriculture, mythology, and medicine, my work considers systems of sustenance and healing and the cultural and ecological legacies of land cultivation. Grounded in the landscape of the southeastern United States— a site of fantasy, precarity, and symbolic abundance—the work presents chimeric objects in which allegories of sustenance, danger, and purification merge. Working primarily between ceramics and metal, materials bound with associations of strength and fragility, a material interplay mirrors the themes of danger and resilience within the work.
In a literal and poetic sense, vessels function as mediators in the interactions that they might symbolize or facilitate. The sculptural vessel forms I make are hand-built and adorned with relief carvings and cast details of vernacular objects such as deer hooves, peach pits, puzzle pieces, electric fencing insulators, tools, and toys. Animals are often rendered in ambiguous states of metamorphosis, hunt, or performance. In the pieces included in CARE, imagery and narrative involving traditional medicine are woven together on the work’s surface. The work’s layered surfaces are built through multiple firings and often incorporate metal components. Referencing objects of protection and historical depictions of infernal and sublime landscapes, they imagine possibilities of connection between wild and domestic realms, between chaos and play, and hybridity as an emblem of resiliency.
Another Single Chill by Isys Hennigar
Golden Seeds, Golden Weeds by Isys Hennigar
Macon Reed works in sculpture, installation, video, painting, performance, and participatory projects. Primarily, they create large immersive, handmade installations that host extensive participatory programming through a queer and intersectional feminist lens. A set of central concerns guides each project; consensual power exchange, inquiry towards the collective, and bringing histories or communities together that have been overlooked or structurally disconnected from one another Reed is also known for their painting and video works.
Reed completed an MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a University Fellow in 2013 and received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. Reed’s work has been exhibited at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, PULSE NYC Special Projects, San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Spring Break Art Show, Columbia University, Transmediale Vorspiel (Berlin), La Patinoire Royale (Brussels), University of New South Wales Gallery (Sydney). They have completed fellowships at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Eyebeam Center for Art+Technology, and the Royal Academy of Arts (London). Reed’s work has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Artnet News, ArteTV Paris, ArteTV Germany, Whitewall, Hyperallergic, Vice, and The Washington Post.
Witchual, is a video performance depicting a ritual sacrifice and live burial enacted by genderqueer, trans, and/or femme performers. The piece explores ancient feminine and earth-based spiritualities, interwoven with themes of queer fertility, catharsis, sacrifice, healing, and regeneration. As performers encircle and entangle a human maypole (performed by Rosé Hernandez), her voice creates a dysphoric soundscape, culminating in her descent into a wet grave.
Through its symbolic gestures, Witchual presents an intense meditation on care as both an act of sacrifice and renewal—raising questions about the burden of caregiving, the emotional toll of care, and the ways in which care can be a transformative, even painful, act. By embodying cycles of death and rebirth, the piece speaks to how care manifests in personal, societal, and spiritual dimensions, as well as the necessity of collective healing.
Witchual | HD Video 1080p, 9 min, 14 sec by Macon Reed
If you haven’t already, we’d like to invite you to become a Loyalty Member and support the next season of exhibitions to help us continue our mission. Here are some of the ways your membership makes an impact: