PHILADELPHIA
Carriers
Jan 31 - Mar 14, 2026
Reception: Thursday, Feb 12, 6 - 9 pm
This group of artists considers the fragmentation of both personal and cultural memory. Fragmentation often takes place gradually and results in a parallel accumulation – an accumulation of loose parts that obscure evidence, that mark efforts to preserve, and that assemble into something wholly new. Mary Laube, Brianna Howard, and Andrew Ina are concerned with the nature of this dual process. Each artist poses questions about the loss or gain that fragmentation can result in, and how we chart these ever-unfolding changes.
Mary Laube offers painted patchwork glimpses of lost or stolen cultural artifacts, frustrating a desire for proximity through partial views and barriers. Andrew Ina’s video installation traces family histories of immigration and cultural displacement within the SWANA diaspora, considering the instability of photography as a carrier of memory. Brianna Howard’s paintings question the unity of established systems of representation, abstracting images down to pixels and halftones in microscopic detail.
What materials do we place faith in to hold our individual and collective memories? When the archive is troubled, unstable, or illegible, what are the implications for personal and cultural belonging? In posing questions on the ephemerality of what gets carried through time, these artists draw attention to the layered histories we are all a part of, and the way we fill in for what is lost.
About the artists:
Mary Laube received her MFA from The University of Iowa. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC), Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC), Tristar Arts (Knoxville, TN), and Groundfloor Contemporary (Birmingham, AL). Group exhibitions include the Knoxville Museum of Art, Laney Contemporary (Savannah), The Warbling Collective (London), Culture House D.C., Virginia Commonwealth University (Qatar), the Spring Break Art Show (NYC), Monaco (St. Louis), Atlanta Contemporary (with Good Weather Gallery), and the Untitled Art Fair (Miami) among others. Recent artist residencies include Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Stiwdeo Maelor (Wales). Her work has been published in Art Maze Mag, Maake Magazine, and New American Paintings and reviewed in White Hot Magazine and New Art Examiner among others. Laube is currently Associate Professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Brianna Howard is an artist whose work explores repetition, accumulation, and the behavior of systems. Working primarily in painting, she builds surfaces through thousands of small, discrete marks that accrue into fields of vibration, interference, and instability. Her practice investigates how meaning emerges not through representation but through operational processes. How structure produces noise, how legibility collapses, and how perception fills in what systems cannot resolve.
Drawing from both analog processes and the logic of digital imaging, Howard’s work sits at the intersection of material labor and information flow. Geometric constraints, grids, and proto-forms function as rules or interruptions within the surface, forcing the system of marks to adapt and reorganize. The resulting paintings resist quick consumption, instead requiring time and sustained attention, unfolding between pattern and disruption, clarity and blur.
Howard received a BFA in Painting from Boston University and is currently pursuing a MFA in Painting at Temple University. Her work reflects an ongoing interest in how slow, embodied making can engage contemporary questions around information, mediation, and perception.
Andrew Ina explores ethnocentrism, familial histories, and the loss of cultural memory through photography, moving images, and installations. His work has been exhibited widely, including recent exhibitions at RBC Media Gallery in Vancouver (BC), CO-OPt Research and Projects (TX), and Otterbein University (OH). In the spring of 2026, he will be the featured artist at the Light Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, hosted by the Center for Documentary Research and Practice at Indiana University. In 2024, he participated as an artist in residence at the True/False Film Festival (MO). His work has screened widely, including the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (CA), the St. Louis International Film Festival (MO), the Portland Film Festival (OR), the Glasgow Film Theatre (UK), and the Wexner Center for the Arts (OH). Andrew holds an MA in Animation from the Glasgow School of Art (UK) and an MFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver (BC).