Welcome to Two Rooms, a new art space in San Diego. Thank you for your curiosity and openness in attending the inaugural exhibition! I am happy to be back in San Diego after finishing graduate school at home in New York. School provides one with a structured community and I wanted to maintain that sense of comradery and inspiration as I returned across the country. It is my hope that these two rooms can serve as a malleable space, evolving to meet the interests and desires of their visitors. Come and say hello, new ideas and collaborations are in our future.

This exhibition gets its title from a folktale of vague origins. It tells the story of a motley collective making something out of nothing. A stone, inedible and flavorless, is dropped into a pot of boiling water in a town square. Passersby ask what is cooking and are invited to share the concoction. But! The soup just needs something hearty, a punch of savoriness, and a dash of spice. Each onlooker goes back to their home, rummages around, and brings what they can. The ingredients are added, transforming the boiling stone-water into a flavorful broth that can now feed its contributors. In the tale of Stone Soup and in the daily lives of the artists in this show, spirit and inventiveness are the necessary elements of creation.

Stone Soup features artists Deanna Barahona, Doris Bittar, Maddie Butler, Marisa DeLuca, Christian Garcia-Olivo, Heige Kim, Maru López, Sofia Lutteroth, and Luis Alonso Sánchez. These nine San Diego and Tijuana based artists each push up against the societal connotations of their dominant mediums. Through techniques of collaging, collecting, sewing, sculpting, and painting, they manipulate and recontextualize normative material tropes. Just as stones and soup are not a natural pairing, these artists lean into contradictions to expand their repertoires. Aware of the assumed implications of their crafts, they strategically veer from conventional uses to convey a new story of their own making.