Buff started as a message on Instagram from Lenore to Ivette: “I love these photographs, I want to print on them!”  While it took them a few years to actually start the project, this quick message turned into their second collaboration. The work is about conversations: ones that Ivette has with the environment, buildings, and painted out graffiti buffs as she walks throughout the city; conversations Lenore has with Ivette’s photographs, color, patterns, light, scale, collage; and conversations we have with one another while making the work. The resulting unique mixed media pieces are the material result of these exchanges. They invite viewers to see the buffs as something like a found color field painting that has been removed from its original context and then physically and conceptually extended through material interventions.

Buff explores and challenges our perceived categories of masculine vs. feminine. The spaces are often abandoned or industrial, associated with masculine work, and the Buff pieces have decorative, and what are historically considered more feminine media – sewing, and patterning.  Buff allows these associations to intersect, creating subtle tensions that draw attention to these gendering practices. Buff also highlights the way that the space bears the traces of those who inhabit and pass through it; by commenting on it, they reimagine and insert themselves into that space.
@bufffoto

Opening reception – Friday, Sept. 8, 6-9pm
Free and open to all
On display through late October by appointment only

About the Artists:
Lenore Thomas
Thomas is an artist, friend, partner, sister, aunt, teacher and lover of puppies who is working on being more vulnerable in order to get the most out of life. If she isn’t in the studio, teaching, or doing dreaded paperwork – you will find her traveling, learning new hobbies, spending time with friends, her dog Kenobi, buying art (a very good/bad habit!), watching movies or trashy shows on Netflix and of course watching puppy videos. Her current solo work reflects on grief and the messy feelings we experience and finding moments of beauty tucked in between what feels like conflicting emotions. Since 2015 Thomas has worked with collaborator Ivette Spradlin under the name Buff. With three different projects, the duo has been in national exhibitions, screenings and publications and are working on upcoming solo exhibitions in 2023. Thomas received her MFA in Fine Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BA’s in Religious Studies and Fine Art from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Studio Arts. But let’s face it – trashy Netflix shows, and puppy videos are so much more fun to talk about!
@crunchshark

Ivette Spradlin
Spradlin is an award winning, Cuban-American artist whose work centers around the emotional aspects of transition, adaptation and communal ties. She holds a MFA from Tyler School of Art and a BFA from the University of Georgia. Since the 1990’s she has photographed and recorded the stories of members of different subcultures and their environs, such as punks and skateboarders, Cuban exiles in the United States, female-identifying artists, elderly jazz musicians in Pittsburgh, those who have experienced a Bigfoot sighting and her friends and neighbors during the 2020 lockdown.  In 2015, Spradlin and Lenore Thomas formed a collaborative team called Buff.  Buff has created three bodies of work, shown in several exhibitions and publications, and is currently working on a new body of installation work for a solo exhibition at Seton Hill University that opens in September.

Spradlin has shown her work nationally and internationally, and has taught photography and art at colleges and universities in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, including Carnegie Mellon University for the last eleven years. In addition to the Buff exhibition at Seton Hill, Spradlin will have a solo exhibition during Foto Focus in Cincinnati this October. She recently relocated back to the Atlanta area where she is working on an oral history project, reconnecting with her former punk community, taking long night walks, and enjoying being an aunt.
@evieknevie