The exhibition, Within the Menagerie, was conceived and curated collaboratively with Jill Foote-Hutton. It first exhibited as an Independent Concurrent Exhibition for the 2014 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Within the Menagerie then traveled to Clamp Light Gallery in Austin, Texas for exhibition.
The artists of Within the Menagerie, Undine Brod, Jill Foote-Hutton, Magda Gluszek, Roxanne Jackson, Lindsay Pichaske and Kimberly Rumfelt, begin their creative processes with clay. Each of these women grounds their work in clay's inherent association with the domestic and/or the sacramental realms through the respective functional and ritual objects of said realms. Within the Menagerie drew the audience deeper into each artist's narrative by employing various interactive hands-on elements in and alongside their sculptures. The viewers were "asked" to directly build content and establish dialogues with and across all the works.
Beyond blurring the lines between artist and audience, the sculptures blurred the boundary between human and animal as each artist capitalizes on anthropomorphic traits. Tapping into the accessible iconography of human expressions, the sculptures simultaneously shed the self-consciousness of humanity and invoked the directness of animal expressions and gestures. The spectrum of fantastical figures concealed nothing, as they were stand-ins for human subjects who can't or won't say their own truths. This exhibition posed and attempted to answer the question of how various assembled anthropomorphic creatures, speaking on similar themes, could give voice to worlds that often are without platforms yet have much to say. Ultimately, Within the Menagerie examined if context released, created and "played" with by viewers, would make a common "voice" more evident, thus louder and therefore heard.
