A FRAGILE UNFOLDING:
FROM THE SEAT TO THE HORIZON
An Exhibition by Meg Mitchell
(January 17-April 3, 2026)
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Meg Mitchell's A Fragile Unfolding is a digital environment embedded within a physical installation that partially mirrors it. Although utilizing game development software, Mitchell intentionally programmed a world that subverts the expectations of traditional video gaming: there are no goals, rewards, or points to earn, no killing, winning, or narrative progression. Instead, players are asked to navigate a landscape composed of floating islands of ice with a shifting ambient soundtrack and rotating satellites emitting beams of light. It is as poetically atmospheric as it is desolate and unforgiving. Movement through this space is cyclical, unstable, and perhaps even frustrating, as visitors are repeatedly displaced or redirected—producing an experience where personal agency is momentary, contingent, and never fully secured.
Certain aspects of the virtual realm are echoed in tangible objects. The jagged glacial islands of the archipelago, for example, appear as sculptures and also take the form of pin-and-string drawings on the wall. The logic of game programming — grids, hexagons, and the
repetition of basic elements — is reflected in other parts of the gallery, such as the constellation of geometric stools, patterned ceramic tiles, and crocheted blankets. However, where the onscreen landscape can be bleak and unforgiving, the physical installation, with its textiles, tiles, shelving, and cushioned seating, introduces allusions to the domestic. These gestures toward comfort heighten the exhibition's tension, placing bodily ease alongside digital vexation.
By refusing the transactional nature of games and the immersive promise of cyber-escape, the exhibition redirects attention back to the viewer’s body in actual space and time. The digitally rendered landscape’s solemn beauty unfolds as a serene, atmospheric thought-space — one that encourages slowing down, sustained looking, and a heightened awareness of mood, sensation, and presence. The reverberations between the simulated and the real also invite critical thinking about how the mechanics and affective qualities of the game space (isolation, existential questioning, and illusions of progress that undermine one's autonomy), hint at broader systems of power and control that shape everyday life.
ARTIST STATEMENT
explored. The virtual environments do not erase the domestic setting but echo it, stretching its forms into new scales. The intimacy of the seat gives way to the expansiveness of a rendered horizon.
The dialogue between physical and digital reveals a fragile unfolding: a process where what is familiar becomes strange, where comfort exists alongside rupture, and where small gestures of ornament open onto vast distances. In this oscillation, the installation invites viewers to inhabit a shifting terrain of affect, one that resists fixed boundaries between dwelling and departure.
By positioning the seat and the horizon in the same unfolding, the work draws attention to the thresholds where intimacy meets distance, where the domestic gives way to the virtual, and where fragility becomes a condition of both comfort and transformation.
ARTIST ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work represents the efforts of many people. I'd like to acknowledge and thank the following people who have worked on, advised, and supported this project: James Gerken (for too many things to mention); Tim Russell (sound); Christian Ulloa (3D Fabrication); Casey Fletcher (3D Fabrication); Cate O'Connell Richards (ceramic fabrication); Brianna Cole (digital textures); Anamika Singh (2D animation); Christina West and Brian Morgenlander (ceramic consultation); Katie Hudnall (wood consultation); Claire Tomkiw (fiber arts); Becky Alley (pin installation); Jason Kash (installation); and many other friends and colleagues who made small contributions through an hour here or there, sage advice, or moral support.
This installation begins at the intimate scale of the body. A seat, a crocheted blanket, and small sculptural forms cluster together in a grouping of furniture that evokes domestic comfort, quiet rest, and the architectures of everyday life. These objects are neither decorative nor purely functional: they are thresholds, fragile markers of presence, and points of departure.
From these physical fragments, the work extends outward into bleak projected landscapes that fill the space with a different kind of horizon. On the large screen, furniture and ornament reappear as digital architectures, reconfigured and reimagined as terrains to be
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Meg Mitchell received a BFA in Sculpture from the University of South Florida in 2005 and an MFA in New Genres from the University of Maryland College Park in 2008. She is currently aProfessor of Digital Media in the Department of Art at UW-Madison.
Mitchell has shown her work in numerous group and solo exhibitions, at venues such as the Museum for Applied Art in Vienna, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Conner Contemporary, the DC Art Center and the International Waldkunst Zentrum in Germany. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications, such as Art Papers, Art in America and the Washington Post. In 2012 she was also awarded a Expanded Artist’s Book grant from Columbia College Chicago for her project in collaboration with Denise Bookwalter, “Rain/fall,” a data driven artist’s book and mobile application.
RELATED PROGRAMMING + EVENTS |||||||
Artist Talk + Exhibition Reception
From 6:00 to 7:00 P.M. artist Meg Mitchell discusses the ideas informing her practice and what inspired her current body of work on view at 2nd Story. Reception with light refreshments to follow.