Munson Artist-in-Residence Exhibition
Quincey Spagnoletti: Home Studio
March 13 through April 3
Opening Reception: Friday, March 13, 3 to 5 p.m.
Fountain Elms | Pratt Munson Gallery
Free
Exhibition Statement
Inheritance and Performance unfolds as a gentle examination of the ways womanhood is taught, inherited, and performed. Drawing from memory and conversations with maternal figures, the artist revisits the spaces and objects that shaped her — the gestures, rituals, and unspoken rules passed down through generations. Through staged imagery and sculptural arrangements, she reclaims these symbols of upbringing and control, transforming them into sites of questioning and self-definition. The camera becomes both mirror and mediator — a tool for tenderness, confrontation, and release. In this work, the personal becomes collective: a meditation on unlearning, on reclaiming the body and voice from the weight of expectation, and on reimagining what it means to inherit womanhood on one’s own terms.
Artist Statement
When I look back at my childhood and how I was raised I am confronted with ideas and notions on how a woman is supposed to act and “perform” for society. Through my pictorial and arts-related explorations of womanhood, I strive to push back against the traditional norms that have dominated my upbringing, in the process highlighting the challenges of my own internalizations of a women’s role and my attempts to disrupt and unlearn what I have inherited.
Beginning with personal narratives and conversations with the maternal figures in my life, I set out to construct my own perception of space, and inheritance, based on memory. I incorporate human-scaled objects and props, the stuff of childhood and growing up, to ornament this investigation of perception. It is my intention to have the viewer question my intentionality and awareness, to wonder about where I am situated in the narrative of the work.
The nature of control continues to be a recurring theme in my work. I use the camera as a tool to elucidate my own emotions and my relationship to myself and those closest to me. My current studio practice is a back-and-forth between pathos and this notion of control – a constant search for who I am as a woman and how I want to present myself to society. In this way, I hope to leave an inquiry of the matriarchal and the matrilineal for the generations to come.
Free and Open to the Public
The Pratt Munson Gallery is located at Munson Museum of Art at 310 Genesee St. Utica, N.Y.
Gallery Hours
Tuesday to Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday: noon to 5 p.m.
