Fall Gallery Season Opens with Aaron McIntosh’s “Intertwined Archives”
The Department of Art will open its fall gallery season with “Intertwined Archives: Stories of Nourishment and Resilience,” an exhibition of work by Montreal-based artist Aaron McIntosh. An opening reception will be held Friday, September 4, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Walling Gallery on the first floor of Wey Hall, celebrating both the start of the semester and the exhibition's debut. The reception is free and open to the public.
At the heart of the exhibition is a massive quilted kudzu installation with hundreds of queer community stories from across the South. The work stitches together the voices of LGBTQ people across the South, reframing a plant often dismissed as an invasive weed as a symbol of resilience and belonging.
Surrounding the installation is a radical archive of material gathered from LGBTQ archives across Western North Carolina, presented in the form of a compost pile crawling with worms. Paper-cut weeds and other ephemera from McIntosh’s practice round out the show, extending his interest in overlooked plants and untended histories.
A fourth-generation quilter raised in an Appalachian family, McIntosh studied at the Appalachian Center for Craft before earning his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. He now teaches in the Fibres and Material Practices program at Concordia University in Montreal, and his work has been exhibited widely across the United States and internationally.
“Intertwined Archives” runs September 4 through October 16 and is open to all, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Walling Gallery in Wey Hall.
