canvas. Image courtesy of the artist and Couchpotato Gallery, Louisville.
Almost a year ago, I lamented the lack of gallery activity in Louisville in my writing. Standing in a crowd of people at Couchpotato’s recent opening Matrilineal, a two-person show by Vita Kari and LaNia Roberts, I was reminded of the swift possibility for positive change.
The art social calendar was packed that night and I couldn’t attend every event even if I tried. Louisville is now enamored with independent house galleries, with Couchpotato being one of them. Founder Amethyst Beaver writes on their website that the gallery “was born from the spirit of DIY punk house shows and the desire to break with traditional art world rules.”[1]
jacquard, Archival Frutiger Metro, Rhinestones, brushed aluminum. Image courtesy of the artist and Couchpotato Gallery, Louisville.
Situated in the Shelby Park neighborhood and living room of Beaver’s home, openings spill over into an adjacent entryway and dining room. I visited the night prior to the opening to interview guest curator Jennie Lamensdorf. Upon arrival, I was grabbed immediately by the presence of a substantial hot pink pedestal at the center of the room. On it, Vita Kari’s rhinestone trash sculptures sat glittering. I was quickly lured toward the walls, where portraits by Kari and Roberts hung back, deep in a quieter conversation.
Here the heart of the algorithm, the face, is center of attention. The portraits hum with the tension of awareness—of seeing and being seen. In Roberts’s Between Memory and Spice (2025), universal traces of domesticity can be spotted: a kitchen spice cabinet, photos of loved ones askew on her great-grandmother’s fridge. The figure’s eyes, mouth, nose, and arms are copy-pasted in an array of vibrant color. Unweaving the weft of the face in Hotness Over Heaven (HOH) (2025), Kari nods to digital glitch, with their tapestries mirroring the obfuscation in Robert’s work and recalling patterns from their grandmother’s textile collection.
Kari and Roberts’ overlap doesn’t end there. The two together amass Instagram followings amounting to nearly a million. This sense of visibility inherent to a contemporary digital reality emerges in Matrilineal. Still, the exhibition veers away from the mere spectacle of virality. The portraits play with questions surrounding visibility in all of its shortcomings and possibilities.
Layers of paint and textile slip into fraught tension with a world that tiptoes further and further from glitched utopia. A million tangled wires, though they’re all plugged in. Can visibility be a conduit for not merely awareness, but empathy? I find myself, like always, returning to home. Matrilineal’s tug of war between the digital public and personal breadcrumbs known only to those close to the artists brings into focus the many stages to be found on, from dining tables to scrolling feeds. Without the curator’s insight, I wouldn’t have known the history of these works: a grandmother’s rug collection, the family kitchen. A certain few would, and in that essential intimacy, I feel depth.
In the heart of a friend’s living room turned gallery, I was reminded of the power of proximity and of the increasing predicaments of scale.
[1] “About.” Couchpotato. Accessed August 3, 2025. https://www.couchpotatoartgallery.com/about.
Matrilineal is on view at Couchpotato Gallery in Louisville through September 13, 2025.
