November 15 • grounding Exhibition Reception • Depot Gallery & Bookstore

grounding

Exhibit Dates:  November 2 – 29 2025

Reception Date: November 15, 2025 1pm-4pm

grounding (2025) hosts a range of mixed media sculptures and 2D media that reflect the artist’s ongoing research in the realms of speculative environments and interspecies relationships. The exhibition responds to increasingly harsh environments, and a need for places of sanctuary and transformation. The works are primarily built upon the physical explorations in merging naturally derived dyes and pigments, wool processing, stained glass, fibers, and ceramic, with underpinnings in queer ecological studies, speculative design, and crip theory. The 2D mixed media pieces in the show were first sketched in Saxtons River, VT, in the garden of Michele Burgess (1960-2024). Michele was an exceptional mentor, chosen family member, accomplished artist, and in the words of Jenny Yoshida Park, “a doula, delivering artists into the world.” On November 2, 2024, she passed suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving a rift in the hearts of many, including Ivy who loved her like another mother. Bill Kelly, Michele’s husband, is another formative figure in Ivy’s development as an artist. Ivy and Bill made work in Michele’s garden and studio this summer, spaces that were her sanctuaries, using her paper and drawing tools from works that she never got to finish. The sculptural works in grounding (2025) grow from the artist’s direct experiences in wilderness spaces, from her upbringing in the Sonoran Desert to her current home in the Great Basin. The structures in the exhibition resonate with cacti skeletons, insect egg sacs and cocoons, and human detritus. This exhibition signals a move away from the artist’s nomadic tendencies and focus on grounding in one’s home ecosystem, a settling into space of a sort. 

Ivy Guild, a Reno-based artist, received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine in 2021. A native to the desert, Guild was born and raised in Phoenix, AZ, and moved to San Diego in 2012 to pursue a degree in Marine Biology. Four years later, she graduated with dual degrees in Visual Arts and Art History. Guild channels her medical history, queer identity, and solastalgia into her artwork. She immerses herself in queer, crip ecologies of a post-human world, searching for environmental justice in anthropomorphic vignettes. Environmental concerns propel her to shape sanctuaries and evolved beings that thrive amidst human detritus. Guild considers herself amoebic in her continuous adoption of new art mediums, often hybridizing analog and digital practices. She has a penchant for collecting remnants and scavenging raw materials. By anthropomorphizing the speculative creatures of environments yet to come, Guild hopes to engender empathy for the natural world. Ivy Guild is an Assistant Teaching Professor and area head for Visual Foundations in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her work is in the permanent collections of San Diego State University and Smith College, amongst others. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Neue Welt in Nashville, TN in January 2026. Her website is www.ivyguildart.com.