Anchor Points
Jenn Law
Kelley O’Leary
Louise Frances Smith
Kushala Vora
May 20, 2025 - July 29, 2025
Das Schaufenster, Seattle WA
Curated by Nicole Seisler
Anchor Points
Jenn Law, Kelley O’Leary, Louise Frances Smith, & Kushala Vora
May 20, 2025 - July 29, 2025
About the Exhibition
This summer A-B Projects is popping up at Das Schaufenster, an experimental window gallery in Seattle, with a four-person exhibition.
Consider digital space as a shoreline. We zoom in from across oceans, collect, pool, converse, and then with a click we drift outwards again. For a moment we are connected bodies, in one shared space, and in another instant we are disparate.
The studio is a sort of shoreline, too. An idea surfaces, washes up, and we assemble it. For a brief moment the idea sits in front of us and we observe it before it moves again. Perhaps we let go of it for a while and the idea rests on the corner of a table or between pages in a book; and then suddenly it’s in front of us again, materialized as the same idea, but new.
For this exhibition, the gallery becomes the shore. Photographs, prints, pulp, and clay wash aground from multiple continents, then retreat, and wash aground again. Over the course of Anchor Points, the tide will come in and out of the gallery four times, revealing single works presented in multiple iterations. Every two weeks, the Das Schaufenster directors will enact written prompts that cause the work to orbit, expand, multiply, crumple, fold, dissolve, and reemerge in unexpected forms and relationships.
About the Artists
Jenn Law is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and editor based in Toronto. Working across print-based media, Law’s practice explores cultural ecologies and processes of material storytelling. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK, a BA in Anthropology from McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, and a BFA from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Law has exhibited her work internationally and has published widely on contemporary art and print culture, working as a lecturer, curator, and editor in Canada, the UK, and South Africa. She is the co-editor of Printopolis, published by Open Studio, Toronto, and has contributed to such publications as Craftwork as Problem Solving: Ethnographic Studies of Design and Making (edited by Trevor H. J. Marchand) and Printmaking in the Expanded Field (edited by Jan Stefan Pettersson, Oslo National Academy of the Arts). In 2017, Law co-founded the experimental publishing platform Arts + Letters Press and the journal art + reading. She is currently working on a book and digital archive project with Jillian Ross Print focusing on collaborative print culture and material storytelling in Canada.
Kelley O’Leary (b. Quincy, Massachusetts) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Richmond, CA. Working across image making, sculpture, video, and installation, she explores the relationships between media infrastructure, images and cosmic material bodies. Interested in speculative methods, she engages with both made and found artifacts that reflect how networked technologies mediate perception and restructure temporalities. She is co-curator of Living Room Light Exchange, a new media art salon based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been shown nationally including the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Jan and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis, Glass Box Gallery at UC Santa Barbara, Timeshare, Well Well Projects, 120710 Gallery, Foyer-LA, Pallas, Root Division and Berkeley Art Center. Kelley received her MFA from the University of California, Davis in 2022.
Louise Frances Smith lives and works in Ramsgate, Kent (UK). Louise’s practice spans sculpture, installation and works on paper. Working with an array of materials including clay, seaweed and bioplastic, Louise creates highly textured surfaces to bring attention to the patterns and textures created by nature, magnifying micro details alongside man-made interventions. By collecting materials from her local coastline to use as materials in her work, Louise’s works are conceptually and physically linked to her local landscape where she takes her inspiration.
Louise graduated from CityLit with a Ceramics Diploma (2019) and from Kingston University with a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree (2009). In 2021 Louise received ‘DYCP’ Arts Council England Funding to research the use of local materials in her work. Recent exhibitions include ‘Entangled’ by Liminal Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, London; ‘Living Materials’, Aspex Portsmouth; ‘It gathered here’, Liminal Gallery, Margate; ‘Meant to Fade’, Laneway Gallery, Ireland; ‘2023 Ingram Prize’, Pavilion Gallery, London & ‘Collect Open 2023’, Somerset House, London.
Kushala Vora is a visual artist and organizer working in sculpture, drawing, and installation. Through her practice, she focuses on loosening the exertion of power on oneself, others, and the landscape with which we coexist. Kushala was awarded the 2024 Jyotsna Bhatt Ceramics Award and was named one of 2023’s Breakout Artists by Newcity Magazine. She has been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing, Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taiwan), Anderson Ranch Art Center, and others. Kushala’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums and galleries including the American Museum of Ceramic Art (Sonoma, CA), Indian Ceramics Triennale 2024 (New Delhi, India), Engage Projects (Chicago, IL), and Museum of Fine Arts (Nagoya, Japan). She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a postgraduate diploma in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art History and Curatorial Studies from Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, India, and a BFA from Tufts University/SMFA, Boston. She is the co-founder of Atmo, a reading and praxis forum.
About our host, Das Schaufenster
Das Schaufenster is an artist-run experimental window space working to bring interesting, joyful, and thoughtful art to our neighborhood. Das Schaufenster is a German word meaning “viewing window or looking at window” emphasizing on the act of looking and not what is looked at.
Das Schaufenster was born from the loss of exhibition opportunities for artists due to the COVID19 pandemic. It is housed in an old corner store in the Ballard neighborhood, At the beginning of the pandemic when businesses boarded over we opened up a space to share art with our community and to provide artists with exhibition and curation opportunities. Within the first half year of our existence we have hosted the work of 17 artists from 9 states, monthly artist talks and a socially distanced performance in the neighborhood park across the street.
The challenges artists face from losing their work for over a year are multifaceted. Das Schaufenster gives artists the opportunity to exhibit their work regardless. Our goal is to serve the artists and curators we invite and to give them the freedom to utilize the space for their vision.