Between Rooms
Between Rooms
Grand Valley State University Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan
January 14th - March 27th 2026
Featuring artists Xiao Han, Maddie May, Sarah Sproule, and Rachelle Wunderink.
Between Rooms brings together works by Xiao Han, Maddie May, Sarah Sproule, and Rachelle Wunderink. Through negotiations with domestic materials, imagery, and rituals, these artists question what it means to raise and to be raised across sociopolitical and interpersonal landscapes. Their practices unravel the weight of memory and the complexities of familial life, offering new ways of seeing what is inherited through lived experience.
Han’s video and photography practice reflect on language and migration as a first-generation Chinese immigrant, tracing the intimate and political stakes of raising a child in Canada. May transforms remnants of Midwestern upbringing into unsettling worlds where household objects absorb and narrate the grief, instability, and impact of addiction, violence, and economic disparity in the home. Sproule manipulates plaster into bodily, shifting forms that unsettle domestic order and speak to the tensions of childhood and the resilience of queerness, body politics, and religious trauma. Wunderink explores matrescence—the loss of identity when becoming a mother—through collages that bind women’s images to domestic artifacts, complicating the narratives of care and identity within the home.
Together, these works approach the domestic sphere as both tender and fraught, a site where memory, ongoing experience, and identity are built, unbuilt, and rebuilt. The exhibition asks us to reconsider the everyday spaces and objects that surround us: what stories they hold, what histories they conceal, and how they shape the people we become.
