What Lies in the Shadows Exhibit

What Lies in the Shadows is a convergence of two artists' work, Alex Renbarger and Maddie Hinrichs. Both construct domestic interiors that balance familiarity with ambiguity, using deep phthalo blues, burnt burgundies, and ultramarine purples as near-blacks that carry the eye through the exhibition. Renbarger builds unreal spaces from Photoshopped collages using AI-generated imagery as foundations for her oil paintings. Without the limiting specifics of a pre-existing space, the imagery can be led by feeling, allowing something impossible to take on the atmosphere of memory and feel remembered without ever having existed. Hinrichs achieves a similar feeling from a different direction, instead projecting images of real spaces into lived interiors, capturing and reworking those intersections through embroidery and paint, forcing disparate perspectives together. Her work overlaps and collides images of the real until they begin to lose focus. Together, the work uses shadows to come to terms with the limits of what can be understood and what only needs to be accepted. Not everything needs to be brought into the light to change the way we understand what is in front of us.

About the Artists

Alex Renbarger and Maddie Hinrichs are Lincoln, Nebraska-based visual artists whose work uses domestic space and color to explore emotional and psychological complexities. Hinrichs received her MFA from the University at Albany and has exhibited nationally, with work featured in New American Paintings, The Woven Tale Press, and other publications. Renbarger received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, exhibits regionally and nationally, and focuses much of her professional practice on teaching painting, drawing, color theory, and professional practice. Community is central to both artists, especially through their work at LUX Center for the Arts in Lincoln.

Instagram: @alexrenbargerart · @mp.hinrichs