In “Dirty Laundry,” an art exhibition on view at Hartnett Gallery in UR’s Wilson Commons through Jan. 26, 2026, 11 faculty artists turn their studios and interior lives inside out. The biennial exhibition takes its title from the familiar phrase about “airing dirty laundry,” but here, the meaning shifts from scandal to vulnerability. Visitors are given direct access to the private habits, materials, and emotional undercurrents that shape each artist’s practice and teaching.
The show features drawings, dioramas, photography, printmaking, assemblage, and mixed media work. Rather than presenting a unified theme, “Dirty Laundry” functions as a multifaceted portrait of the artists who make up the department. Each contribution feels like a personal disclosure, whether through memory, labor, grief, humor, or careful attention to everyday objects.
Among the most striking works on display is Professor of Art and Chair of the Art and Art History department Allen Topolski’s “Walter’s Work Day” (2025). The project reconstructs his father’s 1973 work routine as a welder and pipefitter. As a placard next to the piece describes, Topolski clocked into his studio at 8:00 a.m., and produced eight small assemblages, each made within an hour and limited to four components pulled from the obsolete tools and materials already in his studio. Just like his father, Topolski took a single 30-minute break. The uncanny objects he builds look strange and even alien, as if excavated from a place where their original functions have been forgotten. Each piece is listed at $65.67, the inflation adjusted equivalent of his father’s hourly wage. The project becomes a reflection on the tension between labor and leisure and on the way tools designed to make life easier eventually become remnants of the work that once defined them.
That sense of unease also appears in Lecturer of Art Aster Topolski Diaz’s “Terms of Coexistence” (2025). The acrylic painting features trash cans, a pale blue house, an overturned bird and staircases that lead nowhere. The cold, winterlike palette creates a landscape that feels emptied of comfort, a quiet scene of coexistence that is precarious and strained.
A very different form of vulnerability anchors Associate Professor of Art Heather Layton’s ongoing collaboration with three girls in Gaza. The “U.S. Gaza Drawing Exchange” began shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, when Layton reached out to her friend and his daughters, who lived in Gaza. Because direct communication about conditions in Gaza was unsafe, they exchanged photographed drawings through social media as a way of staying connected. Over two years they built a relationship based not on language but on sustained creative care. The drawings function as a historical record and, in Layton’s words, a love letter during genocide.
The girls’ contributions, collected under the title “Memories, Documentation, and Imagination,” reveal the contradictions of childhood under siege. Scenes of violence, starvation, and death appear beside pastel illustrations of donuts, butterflies and coffee cups. These drawings reached an international audience when United Nations General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock opened her World Leaders Summit speech with a reference to them. Visitors to the exhibition can sit on the balcony and look through the stacks of printed drawings that were sent around the world.
Layton’s own series, “I Wish I Could Send You This Glass of Water” (2025), responds to her frustration at being unable to provide her friend and his daughters with even the most basic necessities. In 31 mostly–black-and-white watercolor drawings, the only other color is the vivid blue of a fantastical water pipeline that travels from her kitchen floorboards across continents and oceans toward Gaza. After seeing these drawings, the girls imagined how they could extend this pipeline to others, and they drew a plumber who splits the water pipe into branching channels. The drawings visualize a collective wish for relief that has not yet arrived.
Several artists turn to material fragments and small scale worlds to explore memory and environmental time. Associate Professor of Art, Environment, and Emerging Practices Cary Adams’s “Sapere Aude” (2025) gathers everyday trash such as a shattered phone, a crumpled paper, and a plastic cup. The objects appear insignificant but suggest stories and moments that were quickly discarded. Lecturer of Art Emily Tyman’s “A Love Letter to Keene Valley” (2025) consists of a hanging mobile of beeswax coated butterflies in various colors. Some are orange, some blue, some black and white, and each hangs at a slightly different height, creating gentle movement and a sense of suspended affection.
The natural world appears again in the series of dioramas by River Campus Curator Lecturer Aaron Delehanty. His “Epoch Diorama” works condense entire periods of ecological and human history into toy-scale environments. In “Pre Columbian, Post Columbian,” toy animals and dead trees are separated by a stark metal wall. In the diorama that spans Paleolithic through Cretaceous periods, toy hunters with bows and guns occupy one side while brightly colored dinosaurs populate the other, all arranged on painted corner shelves that resemble a miniature museum. In “Pleistocene, Holocene,” formally dressed toy figures examine archaic fish suspended beneath a shelf. The scenes carry a sense of wonder alongside an awareness of environmental loss.
Balance and bodily presence appear in Associate Professor of Art Mizin Shin’s “中心 Balance” (2025), a thin relief print in black, white, and reflective silver. A woman stands in a balancing pose with one leg lifted and her hands at her hips. The silver material creates shifting highlights that change depending on the viewer’s position, a visual parallel to the act of maintaining balance in one’s life.
Precision and form guide the contributions from Lecturer of Art Joshua Enck, who presents framed sketchbooks from 2009 and 2019. The earlier studies combine pencil and watercolor in rough sketches of chairs and three dimensional shapes that test structure and proportion. The later works are ink drawings of abstract forms with exact lines and geometry. They offer a rare look at the conceptual groundwork behind Enck’s sculptural practice.
In Professor of Art and Lens Based Media Evelyne Leblanc Roberge’s “An impossible index of clouds” (2025), a set of photographic prints plays with the relationship between image, absence, and perception. A blank sheet of paper is photographed against a white wall. A picture of storm clouds appears with a circular cutout, its missing piece shifted slightly behind it. A bird sits on grey carpet behind a metal railing. A sculpture of a shrouded figure exposes only its feet. Each print is pinned to the wall with multiple nails, emphasizing the impossibility of fully cataloging something as transient as memory.
The collaborative installation “Watershed Movements,” created by Director of Digital Media Studies and Academic Director of Studio Arts Stephanie Ashenfelder, Associate Professor of the Dance Program Rose Beauchamp, and photographer and immersive designer Andrea A. Gluckman, explores shared environmental memory. A green- and white-striped tent invites visitors inside to reflect on their relationships with rivers and other bodies of water. Next to the tent, a screen plays recorded stories collected from regions including the Genesee River and the Raquette River. A tall black kayak stands nearby, grounding the installation in the physical presence of water travel.
Across all of these works, “Dirty Laundry” highlights what artists choose to carry with them. Family histories, discarded objects, ecosystems in miniature, political trauma, private acts of care and the fleeting details of daily life all appear in forms that are at once personal and universal. By revealing these intimate processes to the public, the exhibition demonstrates that creation always involves risk, exposure and the hope that someone else will understand.
