Home is where we feel we belong—our body, identity, or community. Our loyalty and desire to share common ground with those around us is something to be celebrated, but also approached with care. For while it can connect and nurture us, it can also quietly shape what we see, believe, and accept as our own.

 

This exhibition moves through that tension—between the beauty of connection and the risk of conformity or limitation.

 

Natalie Galindo gives us a glimpse of what her home by painting intimate portraits of her community—not as people, but of their altars. Objects tenderly arranged, carrying memories and the warmth and weight of love and loss. The simple items, a sunflower, paper crane, fountain, take on a sacred, hazy nature in her paintings. As if existing in a spiritual realm or dream. Galindo reveals the strength of our emotional attachments, and wonders if their power transcends what we can physically see and understand?

 

Stella Chrone approaches belonging from the opposite edge. After escaping a high-control religious cult, Stella Chrone turned to ant colonies as a way to understand belonging beyond imposed systems—drawn to their ability to move as one without hierarchy or command. Ants sense what is needed and respond instinctively, building, adapting, and protecting one another with remarkable precision, creating a form of collective life rooted in care rather than control. Yet within her glass worlds for the ants, invisible boundaries remain—holding a quiet tension between sanctuary and confinement, and asking when the structures that give us belonging begin to limit our freedom.