BLANC cowork + studio
MEDEA
BLANC cowork + studio · 2212 W Peter Smith St, Fort Worth, TX 76102
On View: October 23 – 30, 2026 · Opening: October 23, 6 PM · Organized by Artmetod
Artmetod presents MEDEA, a group exhibition bringing together six artists whose practices approach courage not as a heroic or spectacular gesture, but as the determination to remain faithful to an internal artistic logic even when that logic resists expectation, comfort, or easy resolution.
The exhibition takes Medea not as a figure to be illustrated, but as an image of radical resolve: the point at which an individual refuses to compromise the integrity of a vision simply because that vision is difficult, contradictory, excessive, vulnerable, or socially inconvenient. Across the exhibition, this resolve appears through desire and self-possession, beauty and decomposition, ritual and damaged belief, mortality and regeneration, and the unstable relationship between real places and the cultural memories attached to them.
In Joanna Bavero’s practice, the female body is not treated as an image requiring distance or justification. Her paintings move between pleasure, power, vulnerability, appetite, and control, presenting sexuality through a position of agency rather than passive visibility. Bavero combines traditional oil-painting techniques with unconventional supports including marbled, glittered, and reflective acrylic and Plexiglas, allowing classical technique to encounter materials that actively assert their own surface. Desire is neither softened nor made secondary to formal seriousness; the two remain inseparable. The work insists that sensuality, intellectual precision, vulnerability, and power can occupy the same body and the same image.
Oil paint on marbled acrylic.
8 × 10 in.
That coexistence of seemingly incompatible states shifts into a darker register in Anastasiia Sokolova’s Les Fleurs du mal (2023), a 30 × 40 in. painting that brings Charles Baudelaire directly into the exhibition. Sokolova incorporates handwritten passages from Une Charogne (A Carcass), Baudelaire’s meditation on physical decomposition, alongside an apparently delicate still life of a vessel and dandelions. The flowers cannot remain innocent once they share the surface with the language of putrefaction, yet the text does not simply cancel their beauty. Bloom and decomposition remain simultaneously present. What is beautiful already contains the knowledge of its disappearance, and the painting refuses to protect one condition from the other.
A quieter form of persistence emerges in Rae Pleasant’s Place Mat: Time (2021). Originally conceived as part of a series of cloths for a Kwanzaa altar, the work carries markings that Pleasant associates with grass, rocks, time, and thought. She imagines the textile placed directly on the ground, supporting a person sitting in contemplation. The work moves between ritual object, landscape, textile, and a physical space for reflection. Pleasant’s broader practice grows from her immediate natural and constructed environment and from an attraction to recycled, natural, economical, and accessible materials. Its strength lies precisely in resisting monumentality: meaning is allowed to accumulate through attention, repetition, ritual, and the deliberate recognition of what might otherwise appear ordinary.
The fragility of structures becomes literal in Aleksandr Karapetian’s Altar (2026), an installation approximately 39 × 39 in., assembled from fragments of broken furniture and Orthodox devotional objects, including icons. Domestic objects and religious imagery appear together after rupture. They remain recognizable, but no longer occupy their expected order. An altar traditionally concentrates and stabilizes meaning; Karapetian constructs one from elements whose original structures have already collapsed. The work does not repair the fragments in order to recover an artificial wholeness. Instead, damage itself is retained as part of the object’s history, leaving faith, memory, inheritance, domestic life, and destruction suspended in the same provisional structure.
In Michael Schuetz’s POOF — You Grow What You Sow (Keep Ya Head Up) (2026), destruction no longer appears as a static aftermath but as an active condition from which something else may emerge. Flowers, skulls, fire, money, memory, and growth accumulate within a dense pictorial field where decay and regeneration cannot be cleanly separated. For Schuetz, optimism is not founded on denial. Death, violence, ugliness, confusion, humor, and beauty remain visible together. Drawing on television, comics, cartoons, advertising, and consumer imagery, he transforms the tradition of memento mori into something saturated, irreverent, unstable, and strangely alive. Keep Ya Head Up is therefore less a reassuring slogan than an insistence that damage, however real, does not necessarily become the end of the story.
The exhibition closes this movement between rupture and persistence with Vlada Markidanova’s Wuthering Heights. Yorkshire (2025), a small landscape measuring approximately 11.8 × 15.7 in. Its title invokes Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, bringing an observed Yorkshire landscape into dialogue with a fictional geography that has become inseparable from the cultural imagination of the region. Markidanova does not illustrate the novel. Instead, she returns to a real landscape already saturated with literature, memory, projection, and atmosphere. The modest scale makes the image intimate rather than monumental, closer to a remembered encounter with place than to a panoramic declaration.
Installed above Karapetian’s fractured Altar, Markidanova’s landscape creates a quiet tension between continuity and rupture, exterior landscape and damaged interior objects, physical geography and cultural memory. Yorkshire exists at once as a real place and as a place encountered through Brontë’s enduring fictional world.
Across these six practices, MEDEA does not attempt to establish a single image of strength. Instead, it is structured around the persistence of contradictions that cannot, and perhaps should not, be resolved. Desire coexists with vulnerability. Beauty carries decomposition within it. Ritual survives without monumentality. Sacred objects retain meaning after their structures have broken. Growth emerges from damage without erasing it. A landscape remains real while also being irreversibly transformed by literature and memory.
The exhibition understands courage as the capacity to remain inside this complexity without simplifying it for the sake of acceptance. Medea becomes less a mythological subject than a name for that point of resolve: the decision to preserve the integrity of an internal vision even when doing so means allowing contradiction, discomfort, rupture, or ambiguity to remain visible.
Joanna Bavero
Anastasiia Sokolova
Rae Pleasant
Aleksandr Karapetian
Michael Schuetz
Vlada Markidanova
Fort Worth, TX 76102
6 PM