Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman: Domestic Disruptions Artists Talk and Closing

The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery and Sculpture Garden present Domestic Disruptions, featuring the collaborative photography of Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, curated by Laura Husar Garcia. An artists talk and closing reception will be held on Saturday, October 10th at 2:00 pm. This exhibition is held in conjunction with Filter Photo Festival. For nearly five decades, Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman have worked as a single photographic voice, uncovering the quiet histories, cultural expectations, and enduring myths embedded within everyday life. Domestic Disruptions invites viewers into a reconsideration of the ordinary, where familiar objects and rituals become reflections of the values, aspirations, and contradictions that shape our lives. Across the exhibition, acts of care become cultural artifacts. Flowers and recipes have long marked special occasions, carrying gestures of welcome, remembrance, generosity, and devotion. They reflect decades of women who strived to create beauty and meaning within everyday rituals, while navigating cultural ideals that encouraged an often-unattainable vision of domestic life. Rather than looking back with nostalgia, Ciurej and Lochman ask us to consider what these rituals continue to preserve, and what they quietly reveal about the cultural values that shaped them. Women who embodied the fictional persona known as Betty Crocker line the gallery wall, not simply as portraits, but as witnesses to a history of expertise, labor, and domestic ideals. Photographs of vintage recipe boxes stuffed with handwritten recipes fill the surrounding walls. These little filing cabinets of aspiration and love offer a unique window into cultural history and women's interior lives. This intimate look floods us with memories, while also inviting viewers to dig deeper into the meaning behind the women's intent. Constantly striving to please, many women measured their family's happiness and love in the ambition of every meal. The botanical portraits in "The Fourth Kingdom" series possess an unexpected duality. Ciurej and Lochman's photographs draw us in through beauty and recognition before gradually shifting our understanding of what we are seeing. Their quiet beauty invites us even closer, only to reveal a deeper unease. What first appears delicate and familiar gradually becomes a meditation on permanence, imitation, and the relationship between the natural world and the materials we create to represent it. These works ask us to linger in the space between admiration and discomfort, where familiar forms reveal the histories they contain. The objects gathered here preserve more than memory. They carry forward the aspirations, contradictions, and cultural ideals embedded within everyday life. In doing so, we are invited to reconsider the standards of beauty, care, and perfection that shaped generations of women—and to reflect on how those ideals continue to echo today. What, in the end, were these women really making? — Laura Husar Garcia, Curator --- Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman collaborate on photographic projects that address the confluence of history, myth and popular culture. Their subject matter spans their gendered experience from adolescence to aging and expands into critiques of the social landscape. Staged photography, studio constructions, documentary, alternative processes and artists’ books are varied approaches used in their practice. Their work has been exhibited in the US and internationally and is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, H2 Contemporary Museum/Germany, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Walker Art Center, and Worcester Art Museum. Their artists' books are in the collections of the Yale Center for British Art, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection, and Bainbridge Island Arts Museum among others. In addition to their shared photographic practice, they are contributing editors to the photographic journal Lenscratch. They maintain studios in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois. www.ciurejlochmanphoto.com @barbandlindsaycollaborate

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