MIA BROWNELL
KAT CHAMBERLIN
LEXA WALSH

Catskill Art Space (CAS) is pleased to announce the opening of three new exhibitions by Kat Chamberlin, Mia Brownell, and Lexa Walsh. The exhibitions open on Saturday, November 1, 2025, with an artist talk from 3–4 p.m. and a reception from 4–5 p.m. They will remain on view through December 28, 2025. Working across painting, installation, ceramics, and social practice, the three artists each present deeply immersive and thought-provoking projects that examine power, value, identity, and cultural symbolism.

Mia Brownell’s still-life paintings of food reference both 17th-century Dutch realism and the swirling forms of molecular imaging. Her work considers food as more than sustenance, examining how it is grown, processed, marketed, and consumed, and how it functions as a cultural signifier. Through illusionistic depictions, she probes questions of identity, values, and the parallels between microbiology and the social constructs that shape who we are.

Kat Chamberlin presents a large-scale installation that transforms the gallery with yellow carpet and suspended glass sculptures, paired with a film featuring her own daughter in exploration in play, authority and domesticity. Her work explores motherhood as a metaphor for authoritarian governance and the negotiation of intimacy and individuality. Using relational materials such as, fragile glass, soft bronze, supple walnut, sharp aluminum; her installations invite touch, intimacy, and confrontation, asking viewers to consider vulnerability, power, and dependence.

Lexa Walsh’s new body of work, Breathe with Me Grieve with Me Heave with Me, responds to the fraught simultaneity of the 2024 Summer Olympics and ongoing global conflict. Grappling with nationalism, loss, and resistance, Walsh creates ceramic and mixed media works that serve as both memorials and provocations. Her Epitaph series evokes mausoleum covers made of glazed ceramic, while her Black Cloud series presents poufy ceramic forms, some dripping with chandelier crystals. Blending humor, grief, and resilience, Walsh reflects on decoration, mourning, and the persistence of joy in dark times.

About the Artists

Mia Brownell is a New York-based artist whose paintings merge the illusionistic traditions of food still-life with contemporary scientific imagery, simultaneously referencing Dutch realism and molecular biology. Her “sci-fi still lifes” examine cultural, environmental, and scientific questions around the industrial food complex and consumerism. Brownell has received awards and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the U.S. Department of State. She has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, with work included in collections such as the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. She is currently a professor of art at Southern Connecticut State University.

Kat Chamberlin (b. 1981, Amsterdam, NL) lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and is a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and the Toby Devan Lewis Award. Her installations, sculptures, and films have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and numerous alternative spaces. Chamberlin’s films have screened at international festivals including the Seoul International New Media Festival (NEMAF), Antimatter Film Festival in Canada, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Her work often combines performance, film, and sculpture to explore the tensions between intimacy and power.

Lexa Walsh (b. 1968, Haverford, PA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes site-specific projects, exhibitions, performances, and socially engaged works. Drawing from traditions of social practice, institutional critique, and “radical hospitality,” she creates platforms for dialogue across hierarchies and communities. Walsh holds an MFA in Art & Social Practice from Portland State University and a BFA in Ceramics from California College of Arts and Crafts. She has received awards from CEC Artslink, Southern Exposure, the de Young Museum, and Kala Art Institute, among others. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Exploratorium, as well as in public and DIY contexts.