Barbara Ciurej + Lindsay Lochman | Domestic Disruptions | August 30 - October 10, 2026
Sweet Life from Time, Work and the Task, 2019, Archival pigment print, 14 × 11 inches
Opening Reception: Sunday, August 30, 2026, 3:00 – 6:00 pm
Join us after for a private cocktail hour at the Quincy Street Distillery
Artist Talk: tbd
Exhibition Dates: August 30 - October 10, 2026
Gallery Hours: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 1:00 – 5:00 pm
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Domestic Disruptions, featuring the collaborative photography of Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, curated by Laura Husar Garcia. Please join us on Sunday, August 30, 2026 from 3:00 to 6:00 pm for the opening reception followed by a private cocktail hour across the street at the Quincy Street Distillery.
For nearly five decades, Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman have worked as a single photographic voice, uncovering the quiet histories, cultural expectations, and enduring myths embedded within everyday life. Domestic Disruptions invites viewers into a reconsideration of the ordinary, where familiar objects and rituals become reflections of the values, aspirations, and contradictions that shape our lives.
Across the exhibition, acts of care become cultural artifacts. Flowers and recipes have long marked special occasions, carrying gestures of welcome, remembrance, generosity, and devotion. They reflect decades of women who strived to create beauty and meaning within everyday rituals, while navigating cultural ideals that encouraged an often-unattainable vision of domestic life. Rather than looking back with nostalgia, Ciurej and Lochman ask us to consider what these rituals continue to preserve, and what they quietly reveal about the cultural values that shaped them.
Women who embodied the fictional persona known as Betty Crocker line the gallery wall, not simply as portraits, but as witnesses to a history of expertise, labor, and domestic ideals. Photographs of vintage recipe boxes stuffed with handwritten recipes fill the surrounding walls. These little filing cabinets of aspiration and love offer a unique window into cultural history and women's psychology. This intimate look floods us with memories, while also inviting viewers to dig deeper into the meaning behind the women's intent. Constantly striving to please, these women measured their family's happiness and love in the ambition of every meal.
The botanical portraits in "The Fourth Kingdom" series possess an unexpected duality. Ciurej and Lochman's photographs draw us in through beauty and recognition before gradually shifting our understanding of what we are seeing. Their quiet beauty invites us even closer, only to reveal a deeper unease. What first appears delicate and familiar gradually becomes a meditation on permanence, imitation, and the relationship between the natural world and the materials we create to represent it. These works ask us to linger in the space between admiration and discomfort, where familiar forms begin to reveal the histories they contain.
The objects gathered here preserve more than memory. They carry forward the aspirations, contradictions, and cultural ideals embedded within everyday life, inviting us to reconsider the standards of beauty, care, and perfection that shaped generations of women — and to reflect on how those ideals continue to shape us.
What, in the end, were these women really making?
— Laura Husar Garcia, Curator
Rainforest Flambé from Recipes for Disaster, 2019, Archival pigment print, 26 × 20 inches
Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman collaborate on photographic projects that address the confluence of history, myth and popular culture. Their subject matter spans their gendered experience from adolescence to aging and expands into critiques of the social landscape. Staged photography, studio constructions, documentary, alternative processes and artists’ books are varied approaches used in their practice
Their work has been exhibited in the US and internationally and is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, H2 Contemporary Museum/Germany, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Walker Art Center, and Worcester Art Museum. Their artists' books are in the collections of the Yale Center for British Art, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection, and Bainbridge Island Arts Museum among others.
In addition to their shared photographic practice, they are contributing editors to the photographic journal Lenscratch. They maintain studios in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois.
www.ciurejlochmanphoto.com
@barbandlndsaycollaborate
Laura Husar Garcia is an artist, curator, and creative director based in the Chicago area. As a photographer, her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Fotofever at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, the Barcelona Foto Biennial, and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Newsweek, and The Santa Fe New Mexican, as well as in several books, including America at Home: A Close-up Look at How We Live. Her art is currently on exhibit at Alma Gallery in Chicago.
Garcia serves on the Advisory Board and Exhibition Committee of the Riverside Arts Center where she curated exhibitions of Carlos Javier Ortiz, Erik L. Peterson, Yvette Marie Dostatni, Jay Wolke (co-curated with Paul D'Amato), Past Perfect: Celebrating 30 Years with 30 Artists (co-curated with Anne Harris and Joanne Aono), Alice Hargrave, and Barbara Diener. She is also an Advisory Board Member of Fresh Lens Chicago and Creative Director and Co-Founder of Three Story Media.