What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience curated by Jordan Ahlers

April 3 – 25
What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience in the Balcony Gallery
Opening reception: Friday, April 3, 5:00-9:00 PM
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM with additional hours on Fridays, 5:00-7:00 PM for Gallery 1010 openings.
The Emporium Center, 100 S. Gay Street, Knoxville, TN 37902

What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience brings together nine contemporary artists whose work explores the emotional and conceptual forces that shape human life. Through photography, painting, sculpture, glass, and mixed media, the exhibition examines themes of love, memory, environmental responsibility, identity, and transition. Each artist approaches these subjects through a distinct visual language, yet all engage a shared question: how do we process experience and give form to what we carry within us? Together, the works invite viewers to reflect on the ways personal histories intersect with broader cultural and environmental narratives.

Participating artists:
Patty Carroll
Seth Clark
Tom Eckert
Arthur Hall
Jennifer Halvorson
Heather Hietala
Pam Longobardi
Robert F. Lyon
Samantha Keely Smith
Tim Tate

At its core, What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience considers a question fundamental to artistic practice: why do artists make work at all? Across differences in medium, scale, and aesthetic language lies a shared impulse—to process lived experience, to grapple with the forces that shape our lives, and to translate emotion, memory, and inquiry into visual form. What we carry, individually and collectively, becomes both subject and substance.

The artists gathered in this exhibition engage themes that are deeply personal yet widely resonant: love and loss, environmental responsibility, psychological landscape, transition, and the passage of time. Their works invite viewers not merely to observe but to enter into dialogue—recognizing aspects of their own experience within the narratives and conceptual frameworks each artist constructs. Meaning emerges through the dynamic relationship between artist, object, and audience.

Tim Tate’s work explores perception, memory, and the emotional frameworks through which individuals understand both intimate relationships and broader social realities. His lenticular floral compositions shift between images as the viewer moves before them, reflecting the evolving nature of partnership and devotion. Created after finding enduring love later in life, these works function as quiet meditations on gratitude and the sustaining presence of another over time. Tate’s mirrored constructions extend these concerns through the use of infinite reflective space. In one work, imagery derived from Picasso’s Guernica unfolds within an endless mirror environment, transforming the historical symbol of suffering into a contemporary meditation on displacement and the global refugee crisis. In his Protector series, Tate turns toward remembrance, presenting symbolic guardians that evoke the continuing presence of loved ones who have passed yet remain watchful in memory.

Environmental consciousness informs Pam Longobardi’s work, whose paintings and currency-based collages examine the economic and cultural systems shaping humanity’s relationship with the natural world. By incorporating fragments of international currency alongside imagery that references ecological fragility, Longobardi reveals the complex intersections of commerce, value, and environmental stewardship. Her work underscores the entanglement of financial and ecological systems, prompting reflection on the responsibilities embedded within global exchange.

Through painting, Samantha Keely Smith investigates the terrain of emotion and psychological experience. Her landscapes function less as representations of specific locations than as atmospheric fields that visualize interior states. In Smith’s work, environment and psyche become inseparable, suggesting that the experience of place is shaped as much by memory and feeling as by geography.

Narrative architecture animates the collaged constructions of Seth Clark. His animated buildings tilt, bend, and assume anthropomorphic qualities, imbuing the built environment with humor and personality. These imagined structures suggest that architecture accumulates memory, quietly recording the movements, histories, and lives that unfold within it.

The sculptural vessels of Heather Hietala operate as metaphors for passage and transformation. Boat forms recur throughout her work, evoking movement through uncertainty and change. The presence of an additional oar introduces the possibility of guidance while ultimately affirming the agency of the traveler. Within these contemplative forms, the journey itself emerges as a defining condition of human experience.

Working with vintage cast glass, Jennifer Halvorson explores historical memory and collective mourning. Her imagery often references shared cultural moments, transforming familiar objects into subtle memorials. Through the material language of glass—simultaneously fragile and enduring—Halvorson reflects on how societies process loss and sustain remembrance.

Memory itself becomes material in Robert F. Lyon’s turned wood vessels. Incorporating pencils as symbolic devices, Lyon reflects on cognition, aging, and the fragile architecture of recollection. Memories may appear sharply defined, softly blurred, or entirely erased, while moments of humor temper the poignancy of these meditations on the vulnerabilities of the human mind.

In her meticulously staged photographs, Patty Carroll constructs surreal domestic tableaux in which the female figure disappears beneath elaborate arrangements of fabric, wallpaper, and household objects. Drawing upon the visual language of mid-century American interiors, Carroll examines the cultural expectations historically associated with domestic space and feminine identity. The resulting images are simultaneously playful and disquieting, revealing how identity can become absorbed—or obscured—within the environments meant to define it.

Collectively, these artists are united not by medium but by inquiry. Each body of work reflects a distinct response to the experiences we carry through life—love and loss, memory and transformation, responsibility and belonging. Ultimately, What We Carry proposes art as a site of reflection: a space in which personal histories intersect with broader cultural and environmental narratives, allowing viewers to encounter not only the artist’s perspective, but their own.

Jordan Ahlers is the owner and director of Momentum Gallery in Asheville, NC, one of the leading fine art galleries in the southern United States. With over three decades of experience in the art world, Ahlers has collaborated with thousands of professional artists nationwide, helping to advance their careers and place works in prominent private and corporate collections. He has curated hundreds of solo and group exhibitions across a wide range of media and has partnered with numerous museums to develop and facilitate traveling exhibitions. Known for his discerning eye and thoughtful approach, Ahlers has designed and successfully implemented multiple gallery spaces. Prior to founding Momentum Gallery in 2017, he served as gallery director at Blue Spiral 1 (1999–2017), earning a reputation for his expertise, integrity, and market insight. Momentum Gallery moved into a 15,000-square-foot space in 2020, becoming the largest and most accessible fine art gallery in the region. Ahlers studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and returned to Asheville, where his family has deep roots. He lives there with his wife and children and enjoys the majestic landscapes of the Blue Ridge Mountains.