First Floor Gallery
McGuffey 2024-2025 Incubators:
Stomping On Eggshells
June 6 - June 29
Opening Reception
June 6, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Dean Lhospital, Incertitude (details), photography
A group exhibition featuring artwork from our 2024–2025 Incubator residents at McGuffey.
Chrissy Benninger, Dean Lhospital, Katie Knight, Gabrielle Miller, Paul Norton, and Audrey Parks,
Christine Benninger
I am a watercolorist who uses portraiture and color to capture the intensity of living with chronic illness. My two separate, but concurrent and related, bodies of work, The Five Stages of Grief and The Pre Dawn Blues.
The Five Stages of Grief - Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance - are a nonlinear framework of emotions that everyone goes through when dealing with loss. My representation assigns a dominant color to each stage along with a female face to bring the specific sentiment to life. The previous and following stage colors are also present, as everyone moves through the stages at their own pace and will often repeat stages before finally landing at Acceptance, which has all colors equally manifested.
The Pre Dawn Blues personalizes the theme of loss and acceptance that The Five Stages of Grief generalizes. Each painting is based on a selfie taken between 3-5am, minutes after waking up. They are the raw, vulnerable moments before having to “turn on” , assess my symptoms and get ready to face the world.
Chrissy Benninger, Self-Portrait 8, watercolor
Chrissy Benninger, Anger, watercolor
Chrissy Benninger, Self-Portrait 2, watercolor
Katie Knight
Katie Knight has been drawing since she was 3 years old and painting commissions professionally since she was 18. She practices meditative art, merging realism from the careful observation of objects and forms, with abstraction that arises from artistic playfulness and joy. Through this process, the artist loses themselves and re-emerges with a new understanding. Viewers are invited to immerse themselves into her work to experience the intangible, and to find what is needed within that moment, whether this be presence or escapism. Katie's work also explores the tension between commercialism and authenticity. Can art created for a specific place and time, designed to be accessible and non-intimidating to the non-artist public, still be meaningful, or does its inherent stylistic popularity and bowing to capitalism render it meaningless?
Dean Lhospital
Through intentional use of scale, light, shadow, and negative space, Dean's photography evokes feelings of isolation, melancholy, and profound solitude, while paradoxically fostering a heightened awareness of interconnectedness with the planet and all its inhabitants. His compositions invite viewers to explore the delicate balance between loneliness and belonging.
Dean Lhospital, Nebula, photography
Dean Lhospital, Amparo, photography
Dean Lhospital, Draumsýn, photography
Gabrielle Miller
Gabrielle Miller is a Virginia-based painter and fiber artist. She holds a BFA in Studio Art from James Madison University and will be pursuing her MFA at TUFTS Fall 2025. Her work utilizes self-portraiture and symbols of desire to capture an intimate view of female identity. Introspective exploration of self-image and sexuality results in vulnerable, dream-like compositions.
Gabrielle Miller, Ripple, oil on canvas
Gabrielle Miller, Fledgling, oil on canvas
Paul Norton
The final effect achieved in my drawings is the result of a deeply involved process of repetition and endurance.
It’s very important to me for the entire process to be undergone by hand, as in this way, their fruition comes to pass as a record of my own physicality in time. In the end, each piece contains a particularity of form which only the process itself can determine.
I have several drawing techniques, each with its own rules. Each technique denotes a particular markmaking language which, when followed, leads out of the murky depths of abstraction to rediscover the fundamentals of formmaking. In the lull of repetition, form emerges, and it is my duty as caretaker to make way for its emergence.
In terms of end product, what I’m interested in is composition: how the totality of the completed form fills the page, and how it doesn’t. The form in the end contains an essential drama, wrapped up in the events of the process. In this way, each piece remembers its birth, is scarred by it, is nothing but its birth. There is no other way they could have come about: their final image is a direct result of the imperfections of the events along the way. And through this, they achieve a certain justification within themselves, within their own worlds. These pieces are unashamed of the marks of their birth, and hope to wear them proudly.
The interests that drive my artistic practice have largely to do with a transcendence of self. I myself must get lost along the way for the final body of the form to be found. And the resulting experience of the viewer, I think, should mirror this process.
I deeply want for viewers of my work to take time with these pieces, to get lost in them, and eventually, to arrive at a comfort in their ambiguity. I can’t show them the way, but I can give them the raw tools by which to arrive at their own conclusions, their own way out of the forest. I’d like people, when confronted with my work, to at first be disoriented, lost in a great upheaval, but then to engage in a process from which they will ultimately emerge with renewed strength. In this way, yes, these pieces may seem to have a surface austerity, and yet interaction with them will, I hope, reveal an abounding love, deeply felt in every line. And joy, yes, joy.
Paul Norton, Weave 4, pen on paper
Paul Norton, Weave 5, pen on paper
Paul Norton, Weave 6, pen on paper
Audrey Parks
During my incubator year, I had a dream that this show was called A Window. A window is a portal; a source of light; something to look through; something that simultaneously separates and connects. The space beyond my waking-working life (the space where I make art) is a portal; a source of light; something to look through; something that simultaneously separates and connects.
Making art in the Right Now feels like a kind of sleep paralysis. I needed to find a timeless vantage from which I could craft poems, so I turned to dreaming. I learned that being lost in thought, daydreaming, and clinging to wishful thinking is an empowered place to be. A playground of rest. A way to process. Holding space in a gray area is the action of a reverie. Dreaming is its own form of meaning making, and it generatively resists the precision of The Daily Heavy.
At first, I felt the resistance of clarification: to react, to define, to specifically craft something with intention. I wanted so badly to know: to know what was going to happen, to know who would accept me, to know what to do, to know how to decide. Then, I read a line in an article by Anne Enright: “Knowledge (which can feel like change) does not change anything.” 33 Reveries questions this. Is knowing enough? In my incubator year, I practiced listening to my intuition and instincts, and to work with something integral beyond my lucidity. In the tradition of somatic and occult poetics, I formed poems from a place of wondering, conjuring, and ecstatic experience. My intention was to magic something out of “anything” in an attempt to get unstuck, so I found ways to get comfortable in the unknown.
These 33 Reveries come from a kind of dreamtime, from keeping one eye open in a spiritual world while somewhere else is sleeping. Maybe this is the primordial power of “Stomping On Eggshells”- to wake up out of some kind of amnion and put your foot down.