Pressing will feature new work by Kansas-based artist Rena Detrixhe and Washington, DC-based painter Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann.

At a moment when much of the social discourse around climate change is politicized, reactionary, and focused on increasingly concerning storms, sea levels, fires, and heatwaves, Detrixhe and Mann create intricate and meditative works that reinsert slowness, contemplation, and intimacy back into the conversation about human impact on the environment. While the exhibition title points to the urgent need to address environmental consequences and accountability, it also refers to the gesture of a hand pressing, a deliberate touch, that as exemplified by these artists can have great significance.

Each of the works in this exhibition is a landscape—a vision of a place formed through careful observation and mark making. And each artist’s departure from traditional modes of landscape painting offers a lesson in how to reconfigure our perception of the natural environment.
 

Exhibition Catologue with Essays by Hannah Barco and Andrew S. Yang

Rena Detrixhe

Rena Detrixhe is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Kansas. In her contemplative work she combines repetitive processes and collected or scavenged materials to produce large-scale objects and installations, ephemeral sculpture, performance and drawings. Drawn to materials which possess an inherent story or familiar source and often utilizing natural elements, a continuing objective in her practice is to investigate the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world with attention to histories of injustice.

​Detrixhe received her BFA from the University of Kansas in 2013. She has exhibited in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including a recent one-year research residency with The Land Institute in Salina, KS.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann received her BA from Brown University and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Taiwan, the AIR Gallery and Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Fellowships in New York, NY, and the Individual Artist Grant, Arts and Humanities Grant, Mayor’s Award and Hamiltonian Fellowship in Washington, DC. She has attended residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Sky Dayton, Vermont Studio Center, Salzburg Kunstlerhauss, Triangle Workshop, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Bemis Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Jaipur, India Carbon 12 Residency. Some of the venues where Mann has shown her work include the Walters Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, the US consulate in Dubai, UAE, and the US embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon.

Pressing is supported in part by Lindy and Richard Brewster, ArtsFairfax, and Reston Town Center Association.