Nancy Monk | sml : lrg
June 28 - August 9, 2025
Opening Reception: June 28, 4-6pm
When Nancy Monk was a child, she asked her parents for both a microscope and a telescope—she loved looking at tiny, vast things. The title of her latest solo exhibition, sml : lrg, encapsulates this fascination with the concentric nature of all things: a microcosm mirrors a macrocosm.
Monk’s creative process is no exception to this pattern. A multimedia artist working across sculpture, painting, installation, and graphic design, she looks to nearby objects, the landscapes around her, and natural motifs. Using castaway materials, many of them gifts from friends who know she might repurpose them, Monk builds worlds in miniature—no piece in this exhibition is taller than four inches. Wood cut from weathered oak pallets and leftover brick ends become windows into enigmatic land- and skyscapes, geometric still lifes, and spirited portraits of hybrid characters and animals. Monk considers the spaces between things, simplifying and painting over the nonessentials, and using the natural holes and irregularities in her materials as pictorial elements. Her work, like the practice of Suiseki—the Japanese art of stone appreciation—is a meditation on memory, place, and tranquility.