A FRAGILE UNFOLDING:
FROM THE SEAT TO THE HORIZON
An Exhibition by Meg Mitchell
(January 17-April 3, 2026)
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
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.
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.