Dial Tone is a three-person exhibition featuring Kevin Umaña, Cathy Hsaio, and Emily Hermant. In Dial Tone, Like a visual telegraph, the artists use their disparate iconographies to flag us down in hopes of a conversation.

Umaña’s melodic visual language reduces and distorts cropped images, and the resulting abstract compositions are both geometric and biomorphic. Without figurative cues, the artist’s intuitive approach to visual tones and harmonies signals a defined sensory experience to the viewer. Hermant weaves colorful, geometric silicone “quilts” from impressions of nonviable ethernet cables. Their repeating patterns use left-behind modes of connection to signal a sense of domesticity and comfort. Hermant’s use of recently defunct material culture proposes a return to slowness amidst our contemporary information cycle. Hsiao’s clever anachronisms–cast iconographies from architectural patterns to emojis into wall sculptures–elegantly examine Craft traditions as the result of the human drive to translate our experiences of nature into material…