Artist Reception for Metamorphosis: The Alchemy of Waste, Connective Tissue, and Build Me A Garden: From Soil to Surface

Celebrate the opening of three new exhibitions at the Julia C. Butridge Gallery. Join artists Aileen Chen, Sara Kate Hannon, and Rakhee Jain Desai for an evening of art, conversation, and community as their work explores transformation, connection, and relationships to materials, identity, and land. This event is free and open to the public.

Learn more about these exhibits at the Julia C. Butridge Gallery webpage.

“Metamorphosis” is a collection of works by artist Aileen Chen that explores the beauty and possibilities in giving new life to “waste.” Reclaimed fabrics are sculpted into vibrant blooms. Unwanted objects transform into striking compositions. Chen’s work reminds us of our collective responsibility to preserve our planet, and our own ability to undergo renewals and contribute to a more resilient, harmonious world.

Connective Tissue is an exhibition that explores the unseen threads that bind us to one another and to ourselves. Through layered paintings and drawings, this body of work examines themes of identity, relationships, and the emotional landscapes we navigate daily. The abstracted forms—fragmented faces, reaching hands, and overlapping bodies—become metaphors for the complex and often fragile connections that hold us together. The show invites viewers to reflect on these invisible bonds, offering a moment of introspection into how we connect, disconnect, and seek understanding.

Build Me A Garden: From Soil to Surface explores how relationships with land are developed and reimagined through labor, lineage and living materials. The exhibition uses craft techniques, abstraction, materiality, and sculptural gestures to give form to the intangible: memory, longing, belonging, and the emotional relationship between land and culture.

Drawing from her lineage in Rajasthan, India, Rakhee Jain Desai brings heritage textile knowledge, natural dyeing, mordants, resist techniques, and ecological processes into conversation with a land that did not birth these traditions but now holds its people. Through the acts of growing dyes in Texas soil, harvesting plant matter, and working with natural materials, Rakhee explores what it means to carry cultural knowledge across geographies and to plant it in new ground, building a garden of evolving culture and craft practices where color emerges from the chemistry of natural materials, soil, water, and time.