Jocelyn Mathewes
August 20 – January 10, 2027 @ William King Museum of Art
ABINGDON, VA — Johnson City Artist Jocelyn Mathewes brings "Para(site)dise" to the Contemporary Regional Gallery, William King Museum of Art Aug. 20 through Jan. 10. The opening reception includes a storytelling performance on the themes of the work by award-winning storyteller Hannah Harvey, in partnership with the International Storytelling Center.
William King Museum of Art presents "Para(site)dise," a solo exhibition by Johnson City, Tennessee, artist Mathewes, on view Aug. 20, through Jan. 10, as part of the museum's McGlothlin Exhibition Series. The exhibition brings together over a decade of mixed-media work documenting the interior experience of chronic illness — its labor, its repetitionsand the cost of maintaining a body the world cannot see is sick.
Mathewes works with the materials illness generates: prescription sheets, IV tubing, hospital bracelets, discarded pill packs, gauze. Alongside medical detritus, she draws on the domestic archive — vintage recipe cards, road maps, quilts, cyanotype-printed fabric — layering processes and objects into works that hold grief, dark witand something close to reverence.
The exhibition takes its title from Mathewes' ongoing large-scale installation: paper constructions built from cyanotype prints of weeds pulled from her garden. As the installation grows to cover an entire wall, the metaphor deepens: chronic illness is also a kind of weed, managed and held at bay, pulled and returning. The labor required to maintain functional homeostasis is largely invisible. "Para(site)dise" makes it visible, and lets it overtake the room.
Key works include "Never the Same Again," sculptures built from IV tubing, wire, and bent Slinkys that figure a body altered but still moving; "Medicine Threshold," an interactive sculptural curtain of prescription bottles and shredded money; "Symptoms/Side-Effects," a spiraling origami loop made from prescription sheets; and "30 Days," collages built from Betty Crocker recipe cards, road mapsand medical detritus.
Mathewes has long looked to Flannery O'Connor as a touchstone — O'Connor's description of illness as a place where nobody else can follow. Mathewes has built an art practice in that solitary country, but the work is fundamentally an act of invitation.
Mathewes is the founder of EAT/ART space, an alternative gallery operating out of her home dining room in East Tennessee, which has featured 50+ artists across 24 exhibitions since 2020. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Reece Museum, and her cyanotype practice has been published internationally, including two editions of Christina Z. Anderson's definitive cyanotype survey (2019, 2023), multiple features in The HAND Magazine, and Image Journal issue #118.
Events(RSVP to attend by contacting the museum atrsvp@wkmuseum.org.
Members, Lenders, and Special Guests Reception— Wednesday, Aug.19, 5:30–7:30 p.m. (members only)
Exhibit Opening with Live Storytelling— Thursday, Aug.20, 4–5 p.m., featuring storyteller Hannah Harvey, in partnership with the International Storytelling Center
Tours at Four: Free Public Tour— Friday, Aug.21, 4–5 p.m., led by curator Russell Facemire
Members' Morning— Wednesday, Aug.26, 10–11 a.m. (members only)
William King Museum of Art is a nonprofit visual arts and cultural heritage museum serving Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee. Founded in 1989 and housed in a historic 1913 former school building, WKMA is Virginia's only nationally accredited museum west of Roanoke. The museum presents rotating exhibitions of regional, national, and international art alongside education programs for audiences of all ages.
Category: Exhibits