January 3 - February 22, 2025
Public reception: Friday, January 3, 5:30 – 8 pm

Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present Massachusetts-based artist Hannah Rust’s premiere solo exhibition, Under the Mesh Throes. The exhibition will be on view from January 3 - February 22, 2025, with an opening reception on Friday, January 3rd from 5:30 - 8pm.

A New England native, Rust explores allegorical figures found in early American decorative forms, colonial folk art, cartography and iconography, and reimagines these symbols in the context of contemporary life. The eight paintings, six works on paper and one ceramic relief sculpture presented in Under the Mesh Throes make manifest the unseen forces that animate the everyday.

In a region where evidence of the past is omnipresent, Rust leaves room for this history, while exploring a world still in formation. Time flattens as these elements intermingle. The image of cherubim appears in a number of Rust’s recent paintings as playful antagonists. These celestial beings appear throughout art history - from Byzantine frescoes to the works of Rococo masters. In the 17th-century, as the sobering hardships of colonial life gave birth to the simplicity and sincerity of early folk art, New England colonies co-opted the cherub for use in funerary art. The remnants of these sensibilities are still seen today, and beneath the saccharine cherub, the devastating cultural and ecological realities of colonialism are ever-looming. An image that was once used on grave markers has now been readapted and fashioned into porcelain figurines lovingly placed around New England homes. Rust recalls the wonder of exploring these cherub statuettes in her childhood home and imagining what they might be doing when nobody is looking.

In Rust’s paintings, the delicate narrative patterning of early American wallpaper collides with crisp autumn leaves. Cherubs blow cold drafts into homes, spirits hide in the darkest corners, icons manifest in a forest fire, and a flashlight shows the way as a mystery unfolds. These phenomena disturb the familiar and teeter between balance and chaos, the ordinary and the ominous. The works in Under the Mesh Throes weave together and address the unresolved tension between New England’s colonial history and our precarious present.

These landscapes of feeling,
Spread thick with columnal
Stories of gypsum smoke and wind,
Glowing against the pocky, crinoline mounds
A little orange flame
A bud-faced gem in the lantern
Wrought with persistent devotion
It carries forever somehow