In a site-responsive intervention to the architecture of AAAgent, Ryan Peter presents an installation of black-and-white photograms nested inside the three doorways. The work materializes through cumulation of spray painting, incidental mark making, and traditional darkroom techniques to develop multilayered composites of shapes and forms. The resulting imagery obliquely philosophizes their origin and purpose, a primeval world composed of building blocks of visual and auditory elements. The three totemic runes titled LL, UUU, and Eighth engage in a playful reorientation of letters and sounds, unsettling semiotic resonances.

Peter’s practice oscillates between analog and digital to create postlinguistic tableaus. Digitally sourced, rendered, and altered images undergo a series of generative permutations employing transparent plastic substrates as one-to-one scale negatives. Fingerprints and other indexical traces of the human-made simulate tactile texture of patinated time. Unlike painting or drawing, where the image develops through visible, incremental decisions, Peter’s scenographic compositions remain invisible until the final stage of chemical development—embracing mis-registration, omission, and chance. Peter’s photograms, reminiscent of a trompe l'oeil mise-en-scène, address the transitory purpose of its former life as doorways by extending a participatory view into a liminal space.

The exhibition takes its title from Kicking the Clouds (2021), a captivating 15-minute film inspired by a rare audio recording of Hopinka’s grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother, the artist’s great-grandmother. Hopinka explores his family history within the context of the loss and revival of Native languages. Excerpts from the audiotape and from a more recent interview with his mother play over 16mm film footage taken in Whatcom County, Washington. Hopinka manipulates the color, sound, and speed of footage of social gatherings and landscapes while challenging the tradition of documentary filmmaking by overlaying subtitles and voiceovers that shift between English and Indigenous languages. 

Organized by John Riepenhoff, Out of Sight, Out of Reach brings together artists whose practices engage with the limits of perception, control, and understanding — working at the threshold where certainty ends and discovery begins. Spanning painting, weaving, photography, sculpture, and conceptual art, the exhibition asks what it means to keep going past the edge of what we can see or do.

Artists: Naotaka Hiro, Devin T. Mays, Yuki Okumura, Joseph Grigely, Nicholas Frank, Mamuka Japharidze, Ann Eastman, J. Parker Valentine, John Riepenhoff, Hana Miletić

Water’s Edge: The Art of Truman Lowe is the first major retrospective of the acclaimed Hoocąk (Ho-Chunk) artist. Lowe’s elegant, minimalist sculptures made of willow branches, feathers, and other organic materials evoke the rivers, streams, and waterfalls of the Wisconsin woodlands where he was raised and the canoes used to traverse them. His sculptures and sensitively rendered pastel and charcoal drawings reflect on cultural traditions, memory, and human relationships to place.