knockin’ on your screen door is an exhibition featuring the recent work of Ezri Horne and Indigo Conat-Naar, two local sculptors. Both artists delve into their memories to excavate objects and materials — clay, baskets, hair, Goodwill shelves, neoprene, silverware — to create works that navigate the impossible distances between land, people, and the artists’ senses of home and heritage.

Conat-Naar suffuses repetitive acts of caring for objects into her attempts to care for her family across time and space. In stop by the goodwill, call mom, Conat-Naar and her mother walked together through two different Goodwills — one in Central Square, the other outside of Atlanta. They tried to find the same object — a basket that looked like the sort that Conat-Naar’s grandmother would make. Conat-Naar purchased one and rubbed it in graphite, while her mother photographed the other for Conat-Naar to render. In other works, fish swim endlessly around a memory, lit up within a fake aquarium; baskets become mountains to contain her mother’s cooking spoons; Christmas trees become anchors to hold each other in place. Shown alongside these objects is in the smell of some kind of polish (2024), a video piece in which Conat-Naar polishes her grandmother’s silverware for the first time.

Meanwhile, in Horne’s estranged Southwest, an oversized ceramic cowboy hat overflows with plastic blonde hair extensions; a rubber horse can’t decide where to go; banners made from distressed denim hang proudly on the wall; and trophy cattle horns gently cradle braids of human hair. Intertwining craft processes with layman’s materials, Horne examines their relationship to a family lineage of ranchers, land surveyors, and construction workers in New Mexico. Their reworking of stereotypical Southwestern motifs and childhood objects underlines the paradoxes of an idealized landscape, the western patriarchal persona, and the capitalist pursuit of constant, so-called improvement.

In knockin’ on your screen door, Ezri Horne and Indigo Conat-Naar traverse the gap between their origins and their present. The title of the show references a John Prine song they listened to while making some of these works together, in the summer of 2024. In the lyrics, Prine knocks on the door of an old friend or lover, hoping for someone to open up. An unrequited longing persists, as Prine resolves to make do with the humble possessions of his present: an 8-track and a memory. Horne and Conat-Naar take a similar approach in their work, piecing together tender connections nestled in a handmade basket at Goodwill, or tucked into the mended pocket of an old pair of jeans.

Indigo Conat-Naar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work highlights the fleeting intersections of being, memory, and place that arise from encountering objects in the world. She grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida and graduated from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2021 with a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Philosophy. Recently, her work has been shown at the Boston Sculptors Gallery Launchpad, Installation Space, and Merrimack College’s McCoy Gallery. She will begin her MFA in Sculpture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall.

conat-naar.com
IG: @i.rcn

Ezri Horne’s practice spans ceramics, woodworking, printmaking, and browsing the aisles of home improvement stores. Horne inserts moments of tenderness and humor into otherwise stoic and commonplace forms using unexpected materials and tedious craft processes. Horne, originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, graduated from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2022 with a BA in Anthropology and a BFA in Studio Art. Their work has recently been included in exhibitions at Piano Craft Gallery, Gallery 263, and Commonwealth Clayworks. They currently live and work in the Boston area.

ezrihorne.com
IG: @ezrihorne