Harvey Preston Gallery, in collaboration with Aspen Collective, presents Savanna LaBauve & Lindsey Yeager: Into the Fold
October 25 – November 17, 2024
Harvey Preston Gallery, in collaboration with Aspen Collective, is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring works by Roaring Fork Valley artists Savanna LaBauve and Lindsey Yeager. At first glance, these ceramic and painted works may appear dissimilar; however, in this debut exhibition together, LaBauve and Yeager explore common concepts of finding one’s place within the world, how the choices we make set us on a path, and searching for a way back to one’s self through the mess of it all.
The title of the show, Into the Fold, developed naturally in conversation between the artists while getting to know one another and each other’s work. It became apparent there is a relationship between Yeager’s compositions of painted flora and fauna and LaBauve’s void-like objects in shape and form. Both echo modularity, the collection and arrangement of items, and the idea of this “other place.” While Yeager’s paintings feel like framed niches and folded reflections, LaBauve’s ceramic objects frame and embrace the negative space, creating voids and portals. Both celebrate the space between and understand that sometimes the only path is through – or, in this case, Into the Fold. https://harveypreston.com/into-the-fold/
This is the inaugural Guest Curated exhibition at Aspen Collective and the first of two scheduled exhibitions curated by Sam Harvey of Harvey Preston Gallery.
“Simply put, one of my primary goals as a curator and gallery owner is to focus on ceramics’ position in conversation with and alongside other art forms in contemporary society. Ceramics has always been a material that records and reflects history, and it’s important to make sure that ceramics is seen in conversation with other art mediums. Initially, I envisioned works by Savanna LaBauve and Lindsey Yeager exhibited together, based on the strength of how their individual works played off of one another both visually and graphically.” Sam Harvey, Harvey Preston Gallery Curator & Owner
For LaBauve, her ceramic pieces evoke both the literal and symbolic concepts of the vessel as a container for memory, identity, and absence. Her works often read as having a solidified sense of presence, while at the same time appearing buttressed by the lattice structure of the open grid format. The negative spaces in her sculptures truly speak volumes, alluding to the intangible stories that we carry within us—the unseen parts of ourselves that are often the most powerful. Her work engages the vessel not as a definitive boundary, but as an invitation to fill the empty spaces with meaning and physical engagement.
Yeager’s painted works similarly contemplate the role of boundaries, thresholds, and containment in her compositions. In her richly layered works, Yeager uses the imagery of flora and fauna to explore cycles of life, growth, and decay—many of which suggest a metaphorical kind of “folding” of space, whether through the layering of forms or the way she isolates and frames elements of nature. Her paintings often appear as windows or portals into spaces that feel simultaneously confined and infinite, creating a tension between the enclosed nature of the frame and the expansiveness of the natural world she depicts. Like LaBauve’s ceramics, Yeager’s work reflects the containment and unfolding of narratives—stories that are at once personal and universal, fragmented and whole.
Together, these artists bring complementary understandings of space and containment into a shared dialogue. Yeager’s work invites us to consider the boundaries of nature and the human relationship with the environment, while LaBauve’s ceramics create physical spaces of contemplation, offering viewers a moment to engage with absence and presence in a visceral way. The interplay between their works—ceramic vessels that frame emptiness and paintings that fold in on themselves—creates a dynamic conversation about what is held and what is released, both within the object and within the self.
The choice to bring them together in Into the Fold underscores ceramics’ ability to exist not in isolation but as part of a broader conversation about form, and narrative across mediums. The dialogue between LaBauve’s sculptural pieces and Yeager’s painted compositions emphasizes the multiplicity of ways in which the artist can approach the idea of “containment”—whether through the structural properties of clay or the ephemeral qualities of paint. Both approaches challenge the viewer to reconsider not just the form and content of the work, but also how narratives can be shaped, contained, and unfolded over time.
By pairing these two artists in this exhibition, we open up space for ceramics to be seen in conversation with other mediums, in this case, paintings as part of a larger, ongoing dialogue surrounding contemporary topics, as well as with broader themes of self-exploration, memory, and identity. Into the Fold invites the viewer to consider how objects and images, whether solid or transient, contain and express the multifaceted nature of human experience.
ABOUT SAVANNA LaBAUVE
Savanna LaBauve (b.1994) is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and detail seeker currently focused on creating objects with clay. She received her BFA in Studio Arts with concentrations in ceramics and painting/drawing from Louisiana State University in 2017. After completing a two-year ceramic residency program in 2019, Savanna has worked for various artists and art organizations in the Roaring Fork Valley and continues to pursue opportunities that sustain the creative vitality of her beloved town, Carbondale, CO. Savanna was one of six honored recipients for the 2023-2024 Aspen Art Museum Fellowship. Her studio currently resides at Studio for Arts & Works, an artist workspace with 25+ makers of various mediums. This studio space is where she continues to investigate the power of multiples, develop a language of mark-making, and explore subtle variations of a limited color palette.
“I unearth and collect observations with strong intentions and distinct perceptions. I work at the median of opportunity and expression. I am an observer, an intermediary, and a maker of non-traditional drawings. I find uncommon nuances in everyday occurrences & unlikely intersections – noting the change in density of a shadow when one overlaps another or how a shadow cast upon undulating surfaces distorts & morphs perspective; the power of multiples as a unit versus the fragility of an individual piece; the repetition of lines throughout our surroundings specifically parallels or in a grid formation; the obscurity of transparent layers. With these observations in mind, I make ceramic objects, both functional & sculptural. My functional objects are handbuilt & feature subtle variations of a limited color palette: black, white, & raw clay. Each object’s surface explores bold linear patterns, such as hatching, grids, & checkerboards. My sculptural work is installation-based & process- driven. Pulling from my background in painting & drawing, this work explores the power of multiples: pattern, rhythm, & repetition. Made of numerous clay parts, each part is a result of body movement, the installation becomes a record of time & meditation that is centered on components as marks.”
ABOUT LINDSEY YEAGER
Fueled by a need to find closure in a deteriorating world, Wisconsin-born Colorado transplant Lindsey Yeager paints and illustrates connections between society and nature, between human and animal, translating and reframing human contexts into fearful, raw, and feral allegories. Lindsey received BFAs in New Studio Practice and Illustration from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2021 and she went on to win two Society of Illustrators awards and participate in the 2021-22 cohort of Plum Blossom Initiative’s Bridge Work residency. Her work has been shown at Var Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Soft Times Gallery, Museum of Wisconsin Art, and Society of Illustrators, among others. Lindsey is represented by Var Gallery in Milwaukee, WI and works as the Studio Coordinator of Painting, Drawing, & Printmaking at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, CO.
“Old notes-to-self ask, “When will my life stop feeling like I’m trying to outrun and bemoan the present in service of a better future?” and “Will any amount of change actually be able to fix the pit in my chest?”
The domestic world isn’t made for me, much in the same way that a highway bisects a migratory corridor, threatened in ways I don’t even understand. I saw a Dodge Charger smoke a deer so hard that one of her legs came off her body, her friends overlooking the scene from afar. She waits for the dermestids and spores and crows to return her, bit by bit, back to the earth. I’m her and I’m her companions and I’m the surrounding grass and the pavement and I might also be the guy in the car. Do fungi experience rich inner lives? Their baseline fear level is probably better than a deer’s but they probably do somehow feel the faceted turmoil of being alive. I simultaneously know a devastating amount and nothing at all.
It seems it doesn’t much matter how fulfilling my life becomes. Some of us do just have to fight this relentless but delicate fight, a night fight, one wherein the goal is to wake up the next morning and pretend to be human, and begin again. No amount of change or daily spectacle is distracting enough to make me forget that time passes for others while I spend my time trying to make myself feel less disparate. I don’t hear the frogs anymore, once my only solace through sleeplessness.
I want to look forward to mornings, to moving slowly in the light, to calm space untempered by my own mortal coil, without guilt, without my hands curled into fists. Magpies skipping across railings for scraps and junk mail blown off the counter by the air of an open window.
No human place will ever make perfect sense to me, creature that I am. But sometimes you do have to start over and grieve what once was and cry through it, and things will never be the same ever again, but that’s because you’re a different version of yourself than you recognize, and everything will be okay, but it will definitely not be the same, not even close.
Sometimes I want an older version of myself to hold me and shake the unrelenting fear out of me, someone who can definitively tell me that everything will be fine; someone to tell me that it turned out to be worth it.
Get up. It’s time to be human again.”
ABOUT HARVEY PRESTON GALLERY
Harvey Preston Gallery specializes in contemporary ceramic art, works on paper, and sculpture. Working with nationally and internationally recognized talent, the gallery’s main focus is to put the work of artists willing to push the boundaries of their ideas and materials at the forefront.
“One of the things we do best at the gallery is bring innovative contemporary ceramic art to the Aspen art scene. During the past 10 years, ceramics has also become a hot topic in the larger contemporary art world. Our goal is to have works that make you think and that ask the viewer to participate in a dialogue with the artist.” — Sam Harvey
ABOUT ASPEN COLLECTIVE
Aspen Collective is a contemporary art gallery located in the heart of Aspen, Colorado, within the historic Wheeler Opera House. The gallery represents emerging and established artists from the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond. The gallery serves as a community gathering space for events, openings, talks, and dinners where we champion Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke’s original Aspen idea where the mind, body, and spirit come together.
Contact
info@harveypreston.com
Captions
- Images courtesy of the artists. Installation views by Nikki Hausherr
- Savanna LaBauve, Here & There, Ceramic and glaze, 17.5 x 4.5 x 10.5″
Savanna LaBauve, Arrange(Re)Arranged, 12 component, rearrangeable bench, Ceramic and felt, 15 x 44 x 18.5” as a whole unit
Savanna LaBauve, Paradox Box (Portal) with flowers, Ceramic and glaze, 16.5 x 16 x 5″
Savanna LaBauve, Time Folds Into Three with flowers, Ceramic and glaze, 16 x 5 x 14″
Savanna LaBauve, group of work - Lindsey Yeager, No Going Back (The Last Time I Saw You), 2024, Gouache and flashe on panel, 18” x 24”
Lindsey Yeager, Cotyledon, 2023, Gouache and flashe on panel, 24” x 30”
Lindsey Yeager, Artifact 1, 2022, Gouache and flashe on panel, 16” x 20”
Lindsey Yeager, Tunnel Vision, 2024, Gouache and flashe on panel, 18” x 24”
