In this exhibition, “Under the Owl’s Eye,” Wave Pool’s 2025 Vance Waddell Feminist Artist-in-Residence Marcy Petit explores the loss and reclamation of women’s ancestral ties to nature. Drawing from ecofeminist scholarship, folklore rooted in French-Celtic heritage, and personal family stories, the project reimagines forgotten spaces of feminine power, resistance, and healing.
Petit evokes generations of women who once held ancestral knowledge that was connected to plants, rituals, and the land and who gradually lost this wisdom through time, societal shifts, and capitalist transformations. Each artwork embodies a symbolic gesture of reclamation.
We Will Keep Watching You presents wood logs marked with feminine eyes — a silent, collective gaze from the trees and forest.
A reminiscence about the fate of the witches, Passage is a textile piece where hands appear to burn, yet also reach toward nature.
The Heart of a Witch depicts an oversized human ceramic heart, which is pierced with nails — echoing ancient rituals of violence and resilience, while invoking the powers of love and nature.
In Dry Flowers Are to Remember the Dead, hanging flowers dipped in limestone hover above mirrors resting on beds of dead leaves—creating an altar of memory and mourning.
She Comes Back to Me After Dark invites viewers to confront the shadow of a projected owl, silently watching us. Emblematic animal of this exhibition, it also represents a personal omen for the artist.
Thanks to the generosity of private collector Sara Vance Waddell, two artworks from her personal collection are also on view in this exhibition. Those pieces are Butterflies by Sandy Skoglund & To see and feel marigolds…the workings of the dandelion are not enough by Ebony Patterson. They were selected due to their intimacy and communion to the exhibition’s women and nature centered themes.
With the inclusion of these additional artworks by Skoglund and Patterson, this brings the number of pieces in this show up to seven. The number seven is often associated with the visible planets, each linked to elemental components and characteristics of our earthly environment — metals, plants, animals, and more. It symbolizes the transformative process that precedes the renewal of all things. Together, these seven works create a fragile yet defiant landscape — a space haunted by what has been lost, yet fiercely alive with all that can still be reclaimed.