House / Hold

GearBox Gallery is pleased to present House / Hold, featuring work by Mittie Cuetara and Laura Van Duren.

Van Duren and Cuetara share a sensitivity to how architecture informs our human experience. Laura’s sculptures work through the physicality of form—playful, visceral structures that illuminate the body’s influence on the mind, embracing a deeply corporeal sensibility. Mittie’s paintings, by contrast, explore psychological space through slightly abstracted interior scenes, where domestic tension gathers in shadows, thresholds, and doorways. While Laura builds outward from the tangible presence of bodies, Mittie draws viewers inward to the charged quiet of domestic environments.

Cuetara’s work begins inside – slightly skewed dreamlike interiors act as metaphors for the body, exploring the tension, comfort, resistance, and pull of her shifting relationship to domesticity.Cuetara is drawn to the friction between independence and belonging, ambition and home. The house becomes a shell and an identity—a container for contradictory desires.

The interiors she paints aren’t pristine; their meaning comes from their histories. Rooms bear the imprint of lives lived, and doorways recur as thresholds of change, marking our hesitation before the unfamiliar.

House/Hold reflects this pause—the moment before transformation. Through these spaces, she explores the house as an extension of the self: a site of memory, conflict, vulnerability, and possibility.

In House/Hold, Van Duren navigates the complexities of support systems—those that can feel uprooted and unsteady, even as they are built back up through collective persistence. Through chairs and sculptural forms, the work examines the interwoven issues of housing instability, community support, and resilience amid our shifting political reality.

Swollen ceramic pieces stride forward, precariously balanced on wheels, nozzles, and cobbled-together chairs, illustrating a narrative of collective effort and adaptive repair. This pieced-together community becomes both vulnerable and resilient, emphasizing that real stability and shelter are created not alone, but through interconnected acts of care, ingenuity, and shared endurance. The installation considers how support is made—and remade—together.