Destroyed by Light
BlankHouse Collective (Malinda Blank & Sara Smallhouse)
November 7–30, 2025
Artist’s Reception: Friday November 7, 6–8pm Facebook Event
Workshop—Archiving Personal Collections: Thursday November 6, 5:30pm Facebook Event
Gallery Guide & Price List
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Destroyed by Light - Exhibition Statement
We employed photographic processes, social practice, label writing, collage, performance, and sun exposure to stimulate vibrant interrogation of generational time in an increasingly immediate culture. For this body of work we collaborated remotely and worked together in-person at an artists residency at Doraland Arts Colony in January 2025. Utilizing our experiences in the art museum field as a lens for our artistic practice we both fetishize the art object, and address its ephemerality, endeavoring to soothe ourselves as we face the uncertainty of aging and our futures. Time generates and destroys, and our work is a platform to reflect and engage with what we love, miss, fear and look forward to. BlankHouse Collaborative - Artist Statement
BlankHouse Collaborative is an art collective of two visual and social practice artists that have dual roles as museum professionals and art educators. They playfully explore institutional critique through their varied professional lenses to create visual art, public workshops, and other limitless collaborations. Their work intends to demystify art collections and narrative building as they actively visualize the roles of art professionals. While making the entanglement of the art world more transparent, their art is also a relatable love letter to their friendship. Malinda Blank (she/her) holds an MFA in Photography from CSU, Chico, and BFA from the
University of Southern California. Her mixed media art practice is informed by her advocacy and nonprofit work alongside a career in museum collections and archives. Thematically, her work explores heritage, ancestry, institutional critique, and the invisible hierarchies of art versus craft. Her object-based practice often recontextualizes existing imagery to give it new life and meaning. Having spent her summers with her Old Order Amish family in her childhood, she became fascinated with the aesthetic power and practicality of their traditions. With a deep understanding of the authority and power of art institutions, she aims to dissolve the elitism within gallery walls and challenges audiences to embrace wider interpretations of what creative expressions could be accepted by the fine art framework. Whether working in collage, using Van Dyke process on hand-tatted doilies, tufting recreations of her grandmother’s rug patterns, or creating social practice frameworks for audience engagement, Blank blends what has been labeled “high” and “low” art forms to explore shared experience, tradition, culture, access, and the importance of imparting our personal histories. Sara Smallhouse (she/her) holds an MA in Art History from CSU, Chico and is full-time faculty at Butte College. Smallhouse discovered a passion for Art History and museums at East Los Angeles College. There, she was a student assistant at the Vincent Price Art Museum. While attending the gallery, she noticed that so many students walked by, not entering, not realizing what a wonderful resource of Chicano/a/x art these students had at their fingertips. That sparked a desire to make museums more accessible and engaging to everyone. She has worked at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Hollywood Bowl Museum, Janet Turner Print Museum, Chico Museum and with the Museum of Northern California Art (monca). Smallhouse has over a decade of curating experience, and has become an emerging social practice artist, utilizing social practice increasingly as a tool to engage museum and gallery goers in the Instagram era. BlankHouse Malinda Blank and Sara Smallhouse form BlankHouse Collaborative, established unofficially when they met in graduate school beginning in 2013. They have been collaborating remotely, embracing this virtual practice since the pandemic. Their complementary skills in the visual arts, art history, art education, and museums studies areas, create engaging opportunities for critiquing the institutions of museums and galleries, deconstructing their authority, and empowering marginalized, individual voices. They do so with humor, and their enduring friendship finds symbiosis with their creative process. |