Sessions
Conversations with the artists behind our exhibitions
Sometimes we ask the questions — sometimes artists are in conversation with each other. These sessions are real talk about the work and the artists creating it.
October 8th, 2026 —
In this UNDERSTORY Session, Amalgamation co-curator Douglas Becht sits down with Jamie Richey and Nicolas Romano, whose collaborative work blends photography and mixed media with projection mapping and interactive video. The two met through Tanya Kaiser’s Renaissance Box project, which paired a traditional artist with a digital one, and they’ve been building on each other’s practices ever since. They talk about Tell-A-Graham, a robot assembled from televisions and found objects, inspired by video art pioneer Nam June Paik and now able to run on its own in the gallery, with a camera that lets viewers move shapes and make video clips appear. They also discuss the mirrored, projected entry piece that draws visitors into the show, and Jamie’s DayDream Machine, which explores the gap between dreaming of a better life and being caught in the machine of work and sleep. Along the way, Doug shares the thinking behind his own piece in the show, and the three talk about why they’d rather hear what viewers see in the work than explain it.
October 5th, 2026 —
Artist and Amalgamation co-curator Douglas Becht sits down with fellow exhibitor Jonah Jacobs to talk about how he makes his work. Jonah's path to art is an unusual one: from the Army to a philosophy degree to years of writing, where he started saving the sentences he loved but couldn't use, printing them out, and distressing them with iodine, salt, and tea water. That habit grew into collage, then assemblage, then the layered cardboard sculptures he makes today, built through "creative destruction" and a steady stream of experiments, including one with hydrochloric acid that didn't go as planned. Jonah walks through Colony, the installation at the heart of the show, and a new piece made with his late parents' pill bottles and the first lighting experiments in his work. He also talks about learning to let go of perfectionism when installing a show, and what he's planning for his solo exhibition next September at Waterloo Arts.
September 17th, 2026 —
Recorded on opening night of Amalgamation, before the doors even opened, this is a conversation between gallery director Susan Snipes and artist Douglas Becht, who proposed and co-curated the show. Doug talks about assembling the group — Jonah Jacobs, the collaborative duo Jamie Richey and Nicolas Romano (whose work layers projection mapping over physical pieces), and his own work, including a silk-screened piece wrapped around UNDERSTORY's column, a first for the gallery. Amalgamation explores how deeply technology and humanity now shape each other's direction, identity, and future — a question Doug and Susan sit with directly, without settling on whether that future looks hopeful or not. They also talk candidly about how much Doug's own work evolved from his original proposal, and what it felt like watching a year of conversations become a finished show.
August 2nd, 2026 —
Artists Jackie Carpenter, Renée Jett, and Marian Lyndgaard have a casual conversation about their art practices and participation in the group exhibition at UNDERSTORY titled "Darkness". Instead of a curator-led interview, three of the Darkness artists — Marian Lyndgaard, Jackie Carpenter, and Renée Jett — sat down together, the way they do most weeks, to talk about the show they built together. The three met at Vermont College of Fine Art and have kept meeting weekly ever since. They trace how the exhibition's theme grew out of a shared reading of bell hooks, and how each of them found their own way into it: Jackie through the history of women healers and the body as a site of "dark" knowledge; Renée through how mythology and fear of darkness get used to control people, especially around race; and Marian through prairie restoration, root systems, and quilted fabric buried in the ground. Along the way, they talk honestly about self-doubt, why art matters, and what it means to make work in community rather than alone.
August 1st, 2026 —
In this UNDERSTORY Session, gallery director Susan Snipes talks with artist Marian Lyndgaard about Entangled Communications, a piece made especially for Darkness. Marian works with fabric — heirloom scraps passed down through her family alongside discarded remnants — filled with batting, Poly-Fil, and in some pieces, soil. Some sections were buried directly in the prairie restoration site near her home in Minnesota, in the same spaces where she pulls invasive species and plants new seeds. Marian talks about the parallel she sees between quilting and prairie restoration — both rooted in care, both quietly essential systems working underground — and what it means to give old, half-forgotten fabric a second, active life.
