Every Shiny Thing at Monaco Gallery — Samantha Sanders Leder

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

My whole life has been…
diving diving diving diving
Diving down to pick up on every shiny thing
Just like that black crow flying
In a blue sky
- Joni Mitchell, Black Crow

Every Shiny Thing brings together the work of Molly Berlin (Philadelphia), Morgan Rose Free (Columbus, OH), Sarah Knight (St. Louis), and Samantha Sanders (Philadelphia) for a group exhibition in Monaco’s Main Gallery. Every Shiny Thing takes its title from Black Crow, a song from Joni Mitchell’s album Hejira (1976). This exhibition consists of sculptural objects and drawings that consider the capacity and complexity of nature and our relationship to it.

Many pieces in this exhibition relate us as viewers to something like the crow in Joni Mitchell’s song, diving for shiny things. The beauty and hypnotizing allure of the natural world is highlighted and the exhibition is punctuated by candles and light as if we were bugs being drawn to their flames.

Written by Emily Mueller

ARTIST BIOS

Molly Berlin is a potter based in Philadelphia, PA where she makes large-scale vessels and a production line called Vessel Garden - inspired by the patterns and colors growing up in her parent’s kite shop at the beach in New Jersey. Her work is coil-built and emphasizes volume to highlight the materiality of clay with the underlying belief that handmade objects serve as a portal of connection.
Morgan Rose Free is a Canadian artist who predominantly works in sculptural assemblage. Her conceptual interests lie in human engagement with the outside world, often grappling with ideas around our current climate crisis, loss, desire, and our preoccupation with consumption.
Sarah Knight (they/them) is an artist currently living and working in Saint Louis, Missouri, and Houston, Texas. While a “research-based artist,” their practice hinges on the material properties of melting stone, sublimation, offgassing, and shattering. Geology, topography, cartography, mineralogy, and mythology all play a central role in Knight’s exploration of material.
Samantha Sanders is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work explores grief, environmental fragility, and her rural Pennsylvania upbringing, through the use of plant-based inks that she forages for and creates, which she incorporates into paintings on paper with watercolor, gouache, and collage. In conjunction with the paintings, she also makes small graphite drawings on paper that delve even deeper into the world around her. In doing so, she seeks to bridge the ever-growing gap between humankind and the natural world.