"Translating Spaces" Opening Tomorrow Sunday, June 13th, 5pm-8pm

Madeline Tonzi

"This body of work is an investigation into the significance of memory and place in relation to a newly invented term, solastalgia. This term was created in order to describe the lost sense of place that people experience in the wake of environmental changes. It is a feeling of displacement without having been displaced.

Each work of art is based on a story I collected from various individuals. I asked each person to reflect on a place that has transformed thus reshaping his or her physical, spiritual, emotional, or cultural relationship to that place.

From each response, I began to extract the most vivid imagery in order to reconstruct their memories. I implicated the use of vibrant colors in order to reflect the life experiences that are the essence of memory and place."


Jenn Collins

Jenn Collins relocated about a year and a half ago to Oakland from New London, CT by way of a horse-wrangling stint in the Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming. She is a mixed media assemblage artist working in various materials ranging from animal bone to clay, wood, antique objects and toys. Her work is best described as symbolic narrative through three-dimensional collage. Often spending a large amount of time researching the subjects she is inspired by, the resulting work is a translation of historical and personal symbolism, which gives the viewer space to interpret a story.

After graduating with two majors from Connecticut College's Art and Art History departments, with a minor degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Keble College, Oxford University, England, Jenn was the artist in residence at the Garde Arts Center in New London, Connecticut during the theater restoration process from 1998-2001. She was one of the original artists in residence chosen to live at the Hygienic Arts Coop in New London from 2000-2008. She worked as a restoration carpenter for 10 years before following her passion for horses out west to become a horse wrangler. Now in California, she maintains a thriving studio and continues to explore the mysteries that lie in the tremulous relationship between memory, movement, and object: waiting, elusive, beautiful, her work speaks of the truths of the imagination and the beauty of the forgotten, the discarded, the hidden.