“Little Things”

Elevating the unseen, overlooked, disregarded

Little Things is a group exhibition featuring work in photography, sculpture, painting, and textiles from five recent Lewis & Clark College graduates. This group of artists engage with labor through processes that transform and uplift. While visually distinct, each art piece is rooted in physical making –- hands-on, intimate, and slow.

The exhibition draws its title from contributions that tend to go unrecognized. Cleaning a bathroom, finding lost objects in the yard of your childhood, revitalizing a forgotten rose garden, unweaving and reweaving a piece of jute, recontextualizing driftwood and cut tree limbs. These “little things” are often the result of intense and intentional labor, and they speak to a broader conversation around the values of care and craft.

In alignment with the mission of Toolbox Gallery—a space that celebrates tradespeople, crafts, and working class histories, Little Things elevates objects, spaces, practices, and people dismissed as ordinary. These artists explore the blurred line between the fine arts and trades/crafts, questioning who gets to maintain, make, and be remembered. They revisit personal and public spaces, drawing attention to the tenderness embedded in construction, reuse, and restoration.

Will Merchant’s work is a document of his exploration of processing. His works engage with the unseen or not easily noticed through gathering, documenting, and archiving found objects.

Sophie Abbassian’s painting tells of the decay and renewal of a historic rose garden and is an homage to the hands – past and present – that have tended to this living memorial.

Hollis Sansing uses the camera to investigate how public bathrooms experience interaction with the people who move through them. This focus draws out moments of care and highlights the personality of a place often simply expected, not valued.

Eliza Roberts preserves memory in a boxed filing system referencing elements in its wallpaper backdrop. This tiling wallpaper interweaves plants at her childhood home with objects that littered her yard, showcasing the intersection of the natural world and the human hand in building an environment.

Nuria Nimue Kiesebrink-Pareick’s textile work attends to the dissolving and rebuilding of connections. Loosening and unraveling are balanced by moments of tightening, re-weaving, and tying together. Everything discarded is reused to make something new.

Little Things invites viewers to notice the caring, time, and thought embedded in what we often overlook. Through this work, we can explore how art straddles the line between working-class craft and elite fine art, a precarious tension that mirrors many artists’ lived experiences. Each artist draws from a personal or familial connection to hands-on labor and trades. These roots in making and labor form the emotional core of the exhibition.