sue havens: motherboard

Exhibition Dates: september 5 - 30, 2023

Reception: thursday, september 7, 5PM - 8pm

Closing Reception/artist’s talk: saturday, september 30, 4PM - 6pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Sue Havens: Motherboard. This exhibition features large collage relief paintings, works on paper, paper constructions, and ceramic sculpture.

Works for Motherboard began by rolling up finished task lists during virtual faculty meetings in the spring of 2020. Other ephemera related to being an artist, mother, and professor was incorporated into the process. The heightened anxiety of the pandemic and the relentless pace of applying for tenure were absorbed into tightly rolled regurgitated balls and began to find their way into paintings. Other material sources include junk mail, supermarket circulars, origami experiments, holiday wrapping paper, fast food bags, report cards, recreation center puzzles, tests, and PTA fliers, finding footing on supports made from Amazon boxes. Paintings on paper also evolved including collaborations with her son.

A friend remarked that the new work reminded her of a motherboard. A motherboard is the main printed circuit board in computers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system. A motherboard is specifically a circuit board with expansion capabilities. As the name suggests, this board is often referred to as the "mother" of all components attached to it.

Meanwhile, the loss of Havens’ stepfather and her mother’s relocation to live with her after a Parkinson’s diagnosis accompanied a shift in forms that entered paintings and ceramic sculpture - shapes became more simplified, specific, solid, grounded. This marked a departure from the more idiosyncratic shapes she had gravitated to previously.

This shift dovetailed with difficult conversations with her mother about her inevitable death. During this heart-wrenching extended time of pre-grief, she collaborated with her mother on paintings including prints made by her delicate, paper-thin hands. There was a realization that perhaps this new familiar form could potentially hold a desire that her mother often alluded to— the desire to be “in” one of her ceramic sculptures. This sweet, yet heartbreaking conversation was brief, but not without humor, as she insisted the final work include pink! (a request accompanied by the mutual release of wild and satisfying laughter).

The ceramic works in this show reflect an initial foray into the idea of the urn. The small forms serve as a dry run, perhaps an evolving form of acceptance, with glazing influenced by the sunbaked, layered grids of Florida parking lots and pavers, or perhaps wrapped sarcophagi.

Sue Havens, born 1972 in Rochester, New York, is an artist based in New York and Tampa. Havens received her BFA in Art from The Cooper Union for The Advancement of Science and Art in 1995, and her MFA in painting from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2003. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at The University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

Havens is a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from The New York Foundation for the Arts and a recipient of the 2017 McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellowship. She has exhibited internationally and nationally in venues such as The Marjorie Barrick Museum, (NV), Galerie Nord, (Berlin), The Museum of Drawings, (Sweden), Helena Anrather, The Painting Center, Regina Rex, Jeff Bailey, Postmasters, Frederich Petzel, Art in General, Momenta Art, Sara Meltzer, OK Harris, Pierogi, The Parlour Bushwick, Underdonk, Park Place Gallery, (New York), Atlanta Contemporary, (GA), Geoffrey Young (MA), and Mindy Solomon (Miami) among many others. Havens authored, designed, and illustrated the book Make Your Own Toys (2010), and Her work was featured in Warhol’s Interview Magazine (2018).

For more information on the artist, visit: suehavensstudio.com.

View Catalogue: Havens.pdf