What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience brings together ten contemporary artists whose work explores the emotional and conceptual forces that shape human life. Through photography, painting, sculpture, glass, and mixed media, the exhibition examines themes of love, memory, environmental responsibility, identity, and transition. Each artist approaches these subjects through a distinct visual language, yet all engage a shared question: how do we process experience and give form to what we carry within us? Together, the works invite viewers to reflect on the ways personal histories intersect with broader cultural and environmental narratives. This exhibition continues at the Emporium, located at 100 S Gay St, Knoxville, TN, through May 31, 2026.
Participating artists:
Patty Carroll
Seth Clark
Tom Eckert
Jennifer Halvorson
Arthur Hall
Heather Hietala
Pam Longobardi
Robert F. Lyon
Samantha Keely Smith
Tim Tate
At its core, What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience considers a question fundamental to artistic practice: why do artists make work at all? Across differences in medium, scale, and aesthetic language lies a shared impulse—to process lived experience, to grapple with the forces that shape our lives, and to translate emotion, memory, and inquiry into visual form. What we carry, individually and collectively, becomes both subject and substance.
The artists gathered in this exhibition engage themes that are deeply personal yet widely resonant: love and loss, environmental responsibility, psychological landscape, transition, and the passage of time. Their works invite viewers not merely to observe but to enter into dialogue—recognizing aspects of their own experience within the narratives and conceptual frameworks each artist constructs. Meaning emerges through the dynamic relationship between artist, object, and audience.
Tim Tate, Memories of Guernica, Glass, cast and 3D-printed elements, and LEDs, 34 x 34 x 4 inches.
Tim Tate’s work explores perception, memory, and the emotional frameworks through which individuals understand both intimate relationships and broader social realities. His lenticular floral compositions shift between images as the viewer moves before them, reflecting the evolving nature of partnership and devotion. Created after finding enduring love later in life, these works function as quiet meditations on gratitude and the sustaining presence of another over time. Tate’s mirrored constructions extend these concerns through the use of infinite reflective space. In one work, imagery derived from Picasso’s Guernica unfolds within an endless mirror environment, transforming the historical symbol of suffering into a contemporary meditation on displacement and the global refugee crisis. In his Protector series, Tate turns toward remembrance, presenting symbolic guardians that evoke the continuing presence of loved ones who have passed yet remain watchful in memory.
Pam Longobardi, Imaginal Fields, Gouache, acrylic, ink, pigment on paper, 23 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches.
Environmental consciousness informs Pam Longobardi's work, whose paintings and currency-based collages examine the economic and cultural systems shaping humanity’s relationship with the natural world. By incorporating fragments of international currency alongside imagery that references ecological fragility, Longobardi reveals the complex intersections of commerce, value, and environmental stewardship. Her work underscores the entanglement of financial and ecological systems, prompting reflection on the responsibilities embedded within global exchange.
Through painting, Samantha Keely Smith investigates the terrain of emotion and psychological experience. Her landscapes function less as representations of specific locations than as atmospheric fields that visualize interior states. In Smith’s work, environment and psyche become inseparable, suggesting that the experience of place is shaped as much by memory and feeling as by geography.
Narrative architecture animates the collaged constructions of Seth Clark. His animated buildings tilt, bend, and assume anthropomorphic qualities, imbuing the built environment with humor and personality. These imagined structures suggest that architecture accumulates memory, quietly recording the movements, histories, and lives that unfold within it.
Heather Hietala, Anchors, Wood-fired stoneware, steel, underglaze, lead tire weight, cotton, tea dye, paint, 20 x 34 x 3 inches.
The sculptural vessels of Heather Hietala operate as metaphors for passage and transformation. Boat forms recur throughout her work, evoking movement through uncertainty and change. The presence of an additional oar introduces the possibility of guidance while ultimately affirming the agency of the traveler. Within these contemplative forms, the journey itself emerges as a defining condition of human experience.
Tom Eckert’s trompe l’oeil wood sculptures operate at the intersection of illusion, craftsmanship, and perception, challenging viewers to reconsider the reliability of what they see. Specific works deepen symbolic concerns. Insidious, in keeping with Eckert’s cloaked forms, introduces a more charged subtext that addresses the fraught discourse surrounding gun violence in the United States through the tension between concealment and revelation. Meanwhile, Seven—depicting a veiled billiard ball associated with luck, wisdom, and spiritual awareness—invokes chance and fate, its obscured surface reinforcing the uncertainty inherent in perception.
Working with vintage cast glass, Jennifer Halvorson explores historical memory and collective mourning. Her imagery often references shared cultural moments, transforming familiar objects into subtle memorials. Through the material language of glass—simultaneously fragile and enduring—Halvorson reflects on how societies process loss and sustain remembrance.
Memory itself becomes material in Robert F. Lyon's turned wood vessels. Incorporating pencils as symbolic devices, Lyon reflects on cognition, aging, and the fragile architecture of recollection. Memories may appear sharply defined, softly blurred, or entirely erased, while moments of humor temper the poignancy of these meditations on the human mind's vulnerabilities.
Patty Carroll, Newsie, Photography, Edition of 10, 38 x 38 inches, 40 x 40 inches framed.
In her meticulously staged photographs, Patty Carroll constructs surreal domestic tableaux in which the female figure disappears beneath elaborate arrangements of fabric, wallpaper, and household objects. Drawing upon the visual language of mid-century American interiors, Carroll examines the cultural expectations historically associated with domestic space and feminine identity. The resulting images are simultaneously playful and disquieting, revealing how identity can become absorbed—or obscured—within the environments meant to define it.
"I embarked on this collection seeking to capture, through the power of reflections, presentations not of what is familiar, but of what is truly before me when the shutter opens. In our everyday distracted travels through place and time, I believe we miss mysterious worlds and sometimes extraordinary beauty. These images are each made of one single frame. There is no cutting, no pasting, no cloning, no compositing, no AI. Just available light, composition, and serendipity. What I have captured is what I saw through my camera’s lens." –Arthur Hall, 2026
Collectively, these artists are united not by medium but by inquiry. Each body of work reflects a distinct response to the experiences we carry through life—love and loss, memory and transformation, responsibility and belonging.
Ultimately, What We Carry proposes art as a site of reflection: a space in which personal histories intersect with broader cultural and environmental narratives, allowing viewers to encounter not only the artist’s perspective, but their own.
