Displacement: New Works by Taryn McMahon and J. Leigh Garcia-Opens September 26

The Coburn Gallery at Ashland University will host a two person exhibition titled Displacement: New Works by Taryn McMahon and J. Leigh Garcia. The exhibition will open with a reception on Thursday, August 29, from 4:30-6:30pm. The reception is free and open to the public.

J. Leigh Garcia and Taryn McMahon, both Professors of Print Media at Kent State University, explore themes of displacement in their work. The displacement and racialization of unauthorized Latinx immigrants is both the context and focus of Garcia’s work, while McMahon explores the displacement of nature and landscapes through human endeavors and anthropocentric worldviews.

As a biracial Latina, a seventh-generation Texan of European descent on her mom’s side and granddaughter of Mexican immigrants on her dad’s, J. Leigh Garcia has followed the roots of her own ancestry to shape her artistic practice. Major events in Texas history such as the Mexican-American War, the Battle of the Alamo, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Bracero Program have created a complex relationship between her two cultures: Texans and Mexicans. The residual racial discord that has resulted from these historical moments is both the context and focus of her work. Through printmaking, papermaking, and installation art, Garcia encourages awareness of our current immigration and foreign affairs policies through the lens of her biracial cultural identity. Garcia received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in printmaking from The University of North Texas.

Taryn McMahon’s artworks interrogate ways that natural spaces project our own desires and fantasies of the natural world and our place within it. McMahon blends digital and hand drawn print processes to further explore how our interactions with the natural world are mediated through technology, and are thus fragmented and selective. Through her work, McMahon imagines a future ecology in which technology and reality are collapsed into each other and the natural and the manmade have become intertwined and indistinguishable in the face of unprecedented ecological change. Like a DJ spinning sounds culled from disparate sources, the forms are remixed through the filters of printmaking, drawing, digital photography, and collage.

McMahon received her BFA from The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, and an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. She has received numerous awards for her work including the Southern Graphics Council International Graduate Fellowship and fully funded residencies at Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass Village, CO; Anchor Graphics, Chicago, IL; and Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY. Her work has been featured in recent exhibitions at The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA and Carroll Gallery, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, among others.

The Displacement exhibition will run from August 26 through September 28.The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 12 noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday and is free and open to the public. For more information about the reception or exhibition, call 419.289.5652 or visit us on Facebook.