WANDERLUST

FROSCH&CO is pleased to present Wanderlust, featuring artists Steve Butcher, Seth Michael Forman, Julia Kuhl, Eva Lake, Edie Nadelhaft, Mark Power, and Yanik Wagner. 

“Wanderlust” (from German wandern (to hike or wander) + Lust (pleasure or desire)) means a strong impulse or longing to travel. It describes our collective yearning to escape the pressures of day-to-day life—to disconnect from emails, deadlines, and time and place and embark on a pilgrimage towards a destination we hope never to reach. To wander, then, is to seek transitions, or the unknowable within us. The artists in Wanderlust embrace the liminal passages in life’s journeys as spaces for self-discovery.  

Eva Lake’s collages of vintage cityscapes and modern jewelry advertisements simulate the glamor of travelling in a bygone era. By transforming diamond-encrusted rings into ships, ramp towers, and island getaways, Lake playfully subverts the commodification of our cultural nostalgia for travel. Meanwhile, Steve Butcher obfuscates the central portion of nostalgic postcards featuring landscapes and scenic roads, confronting the viewer with the postcards’ fictive surfaces while allowing viewers to project their personal memories of past journeys. The artist’s POV series combines these generic road postcards with matchbox cars from his childhood, providing a multi-dimensional view into both past and future. 

In a similar vein, Yanik Wagner distills mundane places and events through memory, reflecting on our peculiar state of being-in-the-world by collapsing a sense of physical location, time, and movement. His paintings focus on how we view the world in transit, capturing how our internal vision reshapes our sense of place and how places reshape us in turn. Edie Nadelhaft also paints from a traveler’s perspective, replicating the fleeting impressions of the built environment we form while driving on deserted roads at night. Her paintings traverse the mythologies and realities of the American landscape, following the asphalt-lined countryside on a circuitous journey at once magical and eerily devoid of human life.

Also looking to American expeditions is Seth Michael Forman in his painting series based on Edmund Lewis, a colonial-era surveyor who navigated Connecticut’s then extensive wildernesses to lay out multiple towns. The series’ title, Connecticut Hero, is intentionally fraught, as the land Lewis “discovered” was, rather, that stolen from the indigenous communities who lived there for centuries. Julia Kuhl’s Domestic Textiles Series, meanwhile, uses the vocabulary of women’s craft arts to explore the friction between historical expectations of femininity and how womanhood is experienced in contemporary society. Phrases like “frequent flyer” and “nearly there” interrupt the home textile patterns’ friendly domesticity, recasting them as baggage at odds with the reality they attempt to contain. 

Mark Power takes a different approach to baggage, instead exploring our relationships to the mundane objects on which we rely when we wander far from home. Power’s stacked sculpture of travel-sized containers strips these vessels of their functionality and thereby confronts us with their active role in our defining our experiences, allowing us to reflect on how the things we hold onto shape our personal journeys.

Whether we travel to see the great outdoors, to pursue new passions, or simply for tourism, Wanderlust asks us why we wander. What are we trying to find?