PRESS RELEASE

Primary is excited to announce Home Body, a two-person exhibition showcasing new works by Maine-based artists Alanna Hernandez and Carla Weeks. This exhibition explores lived experiences through memory, materiality, and abstraction. Opening Saturday, March 15, the exhibition will remain on view through April 12, 2025.

The sound of a pirouette. A back curved, knees overhead, lofting through the air. Landing in a soft web of hue, trembling with warmth. A familiar memorial, a calming state, balancing tension, a comfortable comparison to exercises in deeper breathing.

Within the works of Alanna Hernandez, there is a constant movement beyond the surface, probing at the unseen and the deeply felt—the emotional and psychological states that possibly shape a sense of self. Her compositions emerge through an intuitive layering of pastel, pencil, and underpainting on raw wood panels, creating a sensorial depth that mirrors the complexities of the human psyche. Folding, twisting forms intersect with pools of darkness and bursts of color, evoking the body's ability to hold memory, longing, and transformation.

Carla Weeks approaches abstraction as a form of remembrance, constructing a lexicon of shape and pattern that speaks to the enduring presence of place. Drawing from architectural and environmental elements, she assembles rhythmic and resonant compositions, mapping how memory lives within. Repetition in her work is an act of preservation—an attempt to hold onto fleeting moments, to distill experience into a language of form and transparency. Her paintings gesture toward the layered, often fragmented nature of recollection, where time folds in on itself and histories overlap.

Home Body presents a visual conversation that navigates the boundaries between form and space, presence and absence, structure and softness. Both Hernandez & Weeks work exists at the convergence of personal history and collective resonance, where the physicality of painting becomes a feather-light space carved out of anvils subtly floating through the density of air, inviting the slower, more immersive engagement—to witness how material, process, and memory intertwine.

Opens March 15, 2025 at 5 PM
On view until April 12, 2025

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About the Artists:

Alanna Hernandez (b. 1988) grew up on Cape Cod, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2010, where she earned a B.A. in Middle East Studies. During this time she gained some formal art training, as well as education in history, religion, and language. Her work combines her formal education in the arts and humanities, exploration of spirituality, and self-taught art skills. She has lived in Midcoast Maine since 2018. She has shown work in London and New York, and recently finished a residency at Monson Arts in Maine. 

Alanna creates abstract work about trauma and connection. She is interested in how trauma is felt in our bodies, how it interrupts our lives, and how it ripples down through communities and generations. She explores the dynamics of human relationships and how power, compromise, and connection shape our experience. She uses abstract ribbon forms that are interrupted, pushed, pulled, or otherwise altered by external objects to explore these ideas. Moments of tension occur between the ribbons and these objects, or between the ribbons and themselves. Ribbons flow together: soaring, splitting, and dancing back and forth in a movement of give and take. She creates her drawings with layers of crosshatched colored pencil and wax pastel. It's a meditative process that results in a soft, textured work, and invites the viewer to look slowly, and stay present.

Carla Weeks (b. 1985) is a British-born painter and muralist based in Midcoast Maine. She uses abstraction to articulate the subtleties and nuance of sensory memory. In her work, color, line, and form function as glyphs to navigate through the physical and emotional experience of place. Carla’s quiet reflections on the immateriality of memory are a testament to her commitment to careful looking, feeling and existing within the present moment.

A  self-taught painter, Weeks holds a BA in Art History and a professional background in design that informs both her painting practice and multidisciplinary collaborative projects. She has shown work in Philadelphia, New York City, and across New England. She has held residencies at the Ellis Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, Monson Arts in Monson, and The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

Primary (Est. 2007) is a context and research-driven curatorial collective with a focus on public art. We thrive amongst the self-taught, working-class misfits, who explore the margins of a new Americana through pungent, human-focused narratives. Our work engages with the raw and uncanny, celebrating fringe voices, bootleg culture, and intergenerational commentary while connecting new voices in contemporary art with broader audiences and evolving collections.

For further information, please contact info@thisisprimary.com