The Mary S. Byrd Gallery of Art at Augusta University presents A Lesson in Humility, an exhibition of collaborative works by artists Katie Hargrave and Meredith Laura Lynn.
Hargrave and Lynn are artists and educators whose collaborative practice explores the historical, cultural, and environmental dimensions of public lands and American outdoor culture. Working across video, sculpture, photography, textiles, installation, and other media, they combine site-based research, personal experience, and humor to examine how people encounter and understand the natural world, according to a news release from Augusta University.
The exhibition will be from Oct. 22-Dec. 4 with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p. m., Thursday, Oct. 22.. Both artists will be present for the reception.
In “A Lesson in Humility”, Hargrave and Lynn consider the expectations and traditions surrounding outdoor recreation alongside questions of expertise, preparedness, access, and belonging. Their work often places the artists themselves within the landscape, allowing uncertainty, experimentation, and humor to become part of the experience. These encounters provide a way to reconsider familiar ideas about wilderness and the cultural narratives that shape who public lands are for and how those spaces are experienced.
The exhibition also considers the complicated position people occupy within the landscape. Rather than treating nature as something separate from everyday life, Hargrave and Lynn approach the outdoors as a space shaped by environmental concerns, land policy, tourism, cultural history, and human behavior. Their collaborative work moves between the playful and the critical, asking viewers to think more carefully about the ways landscapes are represented, used, and understood, the release continued.
Katie Hargrave is Department Head and UC Foundation Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her interdisciplinary practice engages public space, environmental history, and the cultural narratives that shape relationships to landscape and place.
Meredith Laura Lynn is MFA Program Director and Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Florida State University. A multidisciplinary artist and curator, Lynn considers environment, land policy, climate change, tourism, and representations of landscape through an interdisciplinary practice that includes video, sculpture, photography, and textiles.
Together, Hargrave and Lynn bring humor and critical inquiry to questions surrounding outdoor culture and our relationship to place. A Lesson in Humility brings these ideas together through a collaborative practice that invites viewers to reconsider what it means to experience, understand, and find our place within the landscape.
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