Eleanor Conover and Virginia Overton at Arrival Art Fair
June 13-15, 2025
June 12 VIP Preview
(invitation only)
TOURISTS, North Adams, Massachusetts
Abattoir Gallery is thrilled to participate in the inaugural edition of Arrival Art Fair, taking place at TOURISTS, a hotel and riverside retreat in North Adams, Massachusetts June 12-15th, 2025. Abattoir has been selected to participate by an esteemed team of Curatorial Ambassadors representing institutions in the region and beyond.
Our presentation will focus on Virginia Overton and Eleanor Conover, two artists who consider form, environment, and cultural history in painting, sculpture, and installation work. Process and a response to the built environment is paramount to both—assembling, disassembling, gathering, analyzing how we put together and take apart our natural and built environments.
Virginia Overton is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation repurposing industrial and natural materials. She has exhibited in museums throughout the United States and Europe. In September she opens an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur.
Eleanor Conover is a painter working in Maine whose unique shaped canvases engage with the physical and material conditions of painting as a metaphor for time and space, and the ecology of the Northeast. Conover’s solo exhibition, As the Crow Flies, opens at the gallery May 30th. Recent past exhibitions include Praise Shadows, MA, White Columns, NY, Abattoir, Cleveland, OH; Hudson House, Hudson, NY; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; and Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY.
In addition to works by these artists, we will also have a selection of gallery artists on view in the booth. Dana Oldfather and Jen P. Harris work in Cleveland. Emil Robinson works in Cincinnati. Audra Skuodas (1940-2019) lived and worked in Oberlin, Ohio. Abattoir represents the artist’s estate together with Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Eleanor Conover was born in Hartford, CT in 1988. She earned an MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2018) and a BA from Harvard College (2010). She received a post-MFA teaching fellowship at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and currently resides in Maine where she is Assistant Professor of Art at Bowdoin College. Recent past exhibitions include Abattoir, Cleveland, OH; Hudson House, Hudson, NY; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; and Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY. She was the 2022 Donald J. Gordon visiting artist at Swarthmore College and was the 2020-21 recipient of the Wellesley College Alice C. Cole ’42 fellowship. Her practice has also been supported through artist residencies including The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, Cow House Studios, and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. With an interest in land and the environment, she has additionally engaged in the research of geologic histories in Philadelphia, PA and visual work regarding ecology in coastal places as remote as the Aleutian Islands, AK.
Virginia Overton (b.1971, Tennessee, United States) lives and works in New York. She creates sculpture and installation repurposing materials commonly associated with factories, farms and construction. By means of both subtle and drastic interventions, Overton re-contextualizes these ordinary objects, revealing their intrinsic properties which highlights the wear accrued by passing time. Many of her works are assembled with industrial materials that have been reconfigured to take the composition of naturalistic forms, such as the concrete shapes (originally purposed for tunnel construction) used to create the Untitled (tulip) sculpture in the 2022 La Biennale di Venezia. During Summer 2022, Overton installed a permanent installation consisting of found skylights, paired with replicas to create Untitled (skylight gems) in the Delta Terminal of LaGuardia Airport, Queens, New York.
Recent solo exhibitions include The Frame, New York (2025), White Cube, London (2025), Bortolami Gallery, New York (2024), Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2022); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2022); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2018); Don River Valley Park, Toronto (2018); the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona (2017); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2016); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2014); the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2013) and Kunsthalle Bern (2013).
Preview the presentation here.
