CURRENTLY EXHIBITING AT THE PHOENIX
IMMORTAL THREADS:
SIENNA MARTZ
KATRINA SANCHEZ
JAI HART
SUSAN MADDUX
APRIL 4TH-JULY 4TH, 2025
KATRINA SANCHEZ DETAIL
THE ARTISTS OF IMMORTAL THREADS
SIENNA MARTZ
Sienna Martz is the guest curator and featured artist for Immortal Threads. A renowned sculptor and fiber artist known for her innovative approach to material manipulation and sustainable practices, she has established a strong reputation for her compelling sculptures and installations that often explore nature's adaptability and are made with plant fibers, recycled, and upcycled materials to ensure her art has a minimal impact on our magnificent planet.
Sienna’s sculptures are in public and private collections worldwide. They are exhibited internationally in gallery and museum exhibitions, including in Seoul, Berlin, Rome, New York City, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in major publications, including Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, House & Garden, The World of Interiors, and Domino Magazine. International art museums, galleries, luxury hotels & apartments, art consulting firms, dance companies, botanical gardens, musicians, and non-profit organizations have commissioned her artwork. She received the 2024 Sculptor of the Year Singulart Award.
Sienna is represented by VFA Gallery in New York, New York; Gallery Les Bois in London, United Kingdom; and Soapbox Arts in Burlington, Vermont. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Sienna is currently based in Vermont.
KATRINA SANCHEZ
Katrina Sánchez is a Panamanian-American artist based in Charlotte, NC, working with fiber, soft sculpture and murals. Her practice explores themes of joy, connection, and healing. Through the careful knitting and stuffing of each “knitted noodle” — oversized and plush linear forms that are central to her work — Sánchez engages the soft materiality of textiles to explore the meaning and significance of comfort within an increasingly isolating world. By combining knit and woven patterns, she introduces vibrant color and rich textures into three dimensional space, to create environments that foster tenderness and joy, while playing with scale, to build a sensory effect of playful confrontation and power in her work.
Sánchez’s current practice evolved from experiences repairing personal objects through visible mending in her studio, as well as her background as a seamstress. Her work is also heavily influenced by the matriarchs of her family and the passing down of textile traditions. She holds a BFA in Fibers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is a collective member of Goodyear Arts. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent showings at the VOLTA Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland, and String Theory at Hodges Taylor x Jamila Brown, Charlotte, NC. Sánchez has been commissioned by companies such as Lowe’s, Credit Karma, Truist, and Ally Bank. She is currently preparing for a solo activation at the Mint Museum in Charlotte and a solo exhibition at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Los Angeles.
JAI HART
Jai graduated high school from Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, then received a BFA
from Kansas City Art Institute in MO, and a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Hart has received artist grants, fellowships, and stipends from art organizations, including the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Oregon Arts Commission, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, School of Visual Arts, and The St. Botolph Club Foundation. Jai currently works in Concord, MA.
SUSAN MADDUX
Susan Maddux is a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Japanese descent. Growing up in Hawaii surrounded by vivid colors and sensations, she formed a deep spiritual connection to the natural environment of the islands that shaped her artistic perspective from an early age.
Susan’s background in textile design also plays a central role in her work, influencing her process-driven approach as well as her use of pattern, color and form.
Her career as a designer prompted her to explore different forms a painting could take. By chance, she discovered the power of folding: A simple, ancient gesture with ties to domestic work, traditional garment construction, and folk craft. A life changing exploration of material and personal transformation began. Totem-like, the works are made from raw canvas stained with washes of pigment which are meticulously folded to create dimensional forms transmuting painting into sculpture. Serving as a metaphor for the body at human scale, her textile installations reflect the tension between concealment and revelation, surface and depth. Within the layered textures and hidden depths of each piece, there is an invitation to reflect on the ever-present potential of creative expansion. Susan lectures and mentors artists, sharing her insights on the intersection of art, design, process, and purpose. Her pieces are held in collections across the United States, resonating with audiences drawn to their presence, luminous color, and evocative forms.
Press images and image descriptions at: https://go.uvm.edu/gentree
Read about the Plant Machine Design Group at UVM here: https://plantmachinedesign.studio/
January 2024, Waterbury, VT – Over 600 vibrant prints and an interactive AI installation explore the intersection of artificial intelligence and ecological restoration in The Generative Tree, a groundbreaking exhibition debuting at The Phoenix Gallery. Created by artist Jenn Karson and her Plant Machine Design Group at the University of Vermont, the exhibition is a dynamic interplay of arts and science methodologies while offering a local Vermont perspective on a global era shaped by rapid technological advancements and worsening climate crises. By transforming the gallery into an “art lab,” the exhibition empowers visitors to discover how interdisciplinary thinking enriches our understanding of contemporary life and sparks vital conversations about our shared future.
“What compels me about Jenn’s work is its combination of play and irony with a seriousness about drawing attention to technology’s potential to solve environmental problems,” said Joseph Pensak, founding director and lead curator for The Phoenix. “You’ll be able to walk into this show and enjoy it on a purely visual level even if you don’t have time to get into the weeds of her philosophical approach and its implications (which you should).”
The exhibition transforms The Phoenix into a dynamic exploration of technology and nature. Through an immersive installation of over 600 digital prints and an interactive touchscreen display, visitors engage with custom AI developed by Karson’s team, and human and machine attempts to heal damaged leaves from Vermont forests. Additional elements include captivating photographs, a sound installation, high-precision machine engravings, and drawings that bridge the visual languages of art, science, and technology.
The opening reception featured St. Silva’s electronic live piano looping, drinks and a Q and A on Friday, January 10th.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a remarkable dataset: over 10,000 Vermont leaves scarred by the invasive Lymantria dispar caterpillar during the outbreaks of 2021 and 2022. This collection gains special significance through its timing, coinciding with the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT and the dawn of widespread generative AI technology.
The exhibition begins with a historical parallel: the story of artist-scientist Étienne Trouvelot‘s failed 19th-century silk moth breeding experiment during the Civil War, which inadvertently introduced one of North America’s most destructive invasive insects. “Today, we live in the wake of Trouvelot’s failed experiment while we we’re living in the 21st-century generative AI experiment,” said Karson. Her team uses original datasets of damaged and healthy Vermont leaves to train AI models in “healing and repair,” symbolically engaging artificial intelligence in ecological restoration.
“I’m excited to share this thought experiment for future technologies that celebrate all forms of life. Imagine AI systems that understand they’re part of a larger web of life – connected to humans, animals, and plants in meaningful ways,” Karson added. The exhibition concludes with the debut of Phytomechatronics, a speculative framework imagining technological advancements that nourish rather than extract from biological systems.
Select works, including digital prints and ink-on-paper drawings, will be available for acquisition through the gallery. The Phoenix will also debut an extended series of 12″ x 14″ Phytomechatronic drawings for collectors. Ten percent of proceeds will fund art supplies for Waterbury public schools.
The Generative Tree installation was designed in cooperation with Jon Bondy from Vermont Rapid Prototyping.
About the Artist:
Artist Jenn Karson, Senior Lecturer at the University of Vermont, uses scientific processes and technologies as creative catalysts. Her art practice weaves tactile techniques with generative algorithms, transmuting digital data into architectural forms and visual languages. These artifacts challenge conventional divides between the artificial and the natural, creating a space where technology and nature converge. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions including “Aberrant Creativity,” co-presented by The Arts Council of Brazos Valley and Texas A&M University, and she was recently invited to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Through her Plant Machine Design Group, she advocates for Phytomechatronics: a speculative framework for technology attentive to the vital futures of plant, animal, and human soft bodies.
About the Venue:
The Phoenix Gallery & Music Hall is located in the heart of historic Waterbury Village, Vermont. The Phoenix hosts four curated art exhibitions per year and numerous weekly music offerings. Connected to the Phoenix, upstairs Waterbury Studios is home to four creative small business studios and a small gallery called the Hesterly Black, which hosts four curated solo art shows per year.
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The Generative Tree exhibition is supported in part by the University of Vermont, The Vermont Advanced Computing Center, and the National Science Foundation. It is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award No. 2218063. Computations were performed on the Vermont Advanced Computing Core supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) award No. OAC-1827314.https://plantmachinedesign.studio/