Opening Reception: Friday, August 28, from 5 PM- 7 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, August 28 at 5:30 PM
On view: August 28 to September 25, 2026

The Art Base is pleased to present A Sense of Place, a new exhibition featuring artists Sam Harvey, Hunter Hogan, and Sara Ransford. Though each artist works from a unique perspective, the exhibition reveals the many ways place can be interpreted as something deeply personal and continually evolving. 

For Hogan and Ransford, artists who have spent decades living and working in the Roaring Fork Valley, the landscape is far more than scenery. Mountains, rivers, gardens, and canyon walls become points of departure for work that explores both the external environment and the internal landscapes of experience and identity. 

Sara Ransford’s paper clay sculptures emerge from years of exploring the mountains, rivers, and canyons of the American West. Influenced by the forces of erosion, deposition, and water’s relentless ability to reshape the earth, her layered forms mirror both geological time and the emotional accumulation of lived experience. The repeated building, exposing, and revealing within her sculptures echoes the ways personal histories become embedded over time. Also debuting in this exhibition is a new series of ceramic trays developed during artist residencies over the past four years, where experimentation with multiple clay bodies and remnants of Japanese processes opened new avenues of exploration. 

Hunter Hogan approaches place through observation of the living world. Her paintings are built from drawings, digital studies, and layers of gouache that evolve through an intuitive process in the studio. Recent works were inspired by three months spent in South Africa, where gardens, vegetation, and patterns found in nature became catalysts for abstraction. Rather than painting landscapes directly, Hogan distills the experience of being immersed in them, creating works that evoke the quiet complexity of the natural world. 

For Sam Harvey, making is a way of responding to space and place. Working without a predetermined outcome, he allows each object to emerge through an ongoing dialogue with clay, testing ideas through making, remaking, and refining. Practical realities, including the scale of his kiln and the physical limits of the material itself, become active collaborators in the work. Clay, drawn from the earth, is both responsive and unpredictable; it can bend, break, or fail, reminding us that some aspects of making can be controlled while others remain unknowable. Harvey continually asks how far a form can be pushed in a particular time and place, inventing techniques as needed while exploring volume, body, and structure. His sculptures often recall walls, vessels, monuments, and ancient built forms, where hard edges retain the softness inherent to clay and become anchors for the space they occupy. 

Although their practices differ, meaningful connections emerge throughout the exhibition. Ransford’s layered geological forms, Hogan’s botanical abstractions, and Harvey’s sculptural objects each explore how place is built, remembered, and experienced. Together, the artists reveal that our relationship with place is never static; it is continually shaped by time, experimentation, limitation, discovery, and renewal. 

A Sense of Place invites viewers to slow down and reflect on their own connections to the spaces they inhabit and the places that continue to shape and inspire them. 

This exhibition is generously sponsored by CCY Architects and Kathy Honea

Thank you to our generous 2026 Annual Exhibition Sponsor, Alpine Bank