Meredith Starr and Sarah Kain Gutowski: Beautiful Regenerative Fires
November 2025 to January 2026
Opening Reception November 15th, 2-4pm
Curated by Flounder Lee
928 NW 21st Ave, Gainesville, Florida
Artist Statement
An Exhibition by Meredith Starr with accompanying text by Sarah Kain Gutowski. Beautiful Regenerative Fires explores humanity’s dual role in the cycles of ecological destruction and renewal. It asks what becomes of our shared reality when technology attempts to mirror the living world. The works, digital paintings printed on organic sailcloth, are inspired by 3D scans of native plants and an immersive VR experience inspired by text by Sarah Kain Gutowski. Each glitch in the scanning process becomes a fissure where the artificial falters and the wild world seeps through—reminding us that regeneration cannot be simulated, only nurtured. Within the installation, viewers step into a radiant terrain of the illusion of a future planet, where beauty flickers between decay and rebirth, and the possibility of a truly regenerative future begins to take root.
Curatorial Statement
This exhibition imagines futures grown through care, collaboration, and curiosity rather than extraction or control. Regeneration is treated as lived practice, not simulation. Technology is neither villain nor savior here. It is simply a tool we shape through attention and intention, capable of supporting repair when held with humility and responsibility. With co-futurist and Solarpunk thinking, the work rejects singular fixes or heroic narratives. Livable futures come from collective effort, reciprocal relationships, and staying present with what is already changing around us. The fractures and glitches are not mistakes to erase. They are reminders that growth often comes through interruption, that systems can shift, and that life keeps trying. This exhibition does not offer escape or nostalgia. It asks us to stay with the world we have and commit to building fairer, more resilient ways of living on it, together.
Artist Biography
Meredith Starr is an interdisciplinary artist living in NY who creates interactive moments in her installations using AR and VR. She earned her BS from NYU, her MFA from LIU. She has three apps published to the App Store for iOS devices- Plastic Swim, You Are Here VR and Balancing Act AR. Her work has been published in Suboart Magazine, Art Seen: Curator’s Salon, and CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. She has shown nationally and internationally, notably in Oslo, Seoul, Tokyo, and New York. She recently had a solo show, One Wild and Precious Life, at Auburn University. She has shown selections from Every Second Feels Like Theft at Montgomery College, and work from Are You There? in London’s Great Portland Metro Station and in a satellite exhibit of the Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello. She has completed residencies at Zero Foot Hills, Playa Summer Lake and Two Cents Press in Serrazzano, Italy. Starr is also a full-time professor of visual arts at SUNY Suffolk County Community College. She has collaborated with poet Sarah Kain Gutowski on numerous projects including For Those Who Have Lost Control and It’s All Too Much. When she’s not in the studio you can find her on a run, pausing to photograph a sculptural arrangement of trash at the curb.
@MeredithStarr
www.meredithstarr.com
Sarah Kain Gutowski (she/her) is the author of The Familiar (forthcoming 2024) and Fabulous Beast: Poems, which was a runner-up for the 2018 X.J. Kennedy Prize, a 2019 Foreword INDIES Finalist, and winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poems, and It’s All Too Much, a limited-edition audio project. Her poetry has appeared in various print and online journals, including The Threepenny Review, So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Verse Daily, and The Southern Review. Her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and the New York Journal of Books. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a BA in English and Mass Communications from James Madison University. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Sicily, Western Michigan University’s Prague Summer Program, and the Southampton Writers Conference Script
Development Lab. In 2022, she was awarded an artist’s residency at Stiwdio Maelor in Corris, Wales. She’s taught poetry and mixed genre writing workshops at New York University and for Stony Brook University’s MFA in Creative Writing and Literature Program. A full-time, tenured Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College, Gutowski is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Academy of American Poets, the Popular Culture Association, and Pen Parentis.
@Sarahkaingutwoski
https://www.sarahkaingutowski.com
Upcoming Exhibitions
Elizabeth Allen-Cannon, Solo Show, January 2026