Lisha Bai, JJ Manford, Ann Toebbe
ExtraOrdinary
Aug 1 - 29, 2025
Opening reception: Friday August 1st 6-8pm
ExtraOrdinary:
The extraordinary elevates everyday experiences into something unexpected and wonderful. It might trigger delight, awe, or deep reflection. It can be something objectively remarkable or something profoundly personal. While our lives are structured around the ordinary—the predictable and familiar—the extraordinary pushes us past that into a realm of heightened feeling and perception.
ExtraOrdinary brings together three artists—Ann Toebbe, JJ Manford, and Lisha Bai—whose work transforms everyday domestic spaces into scenes of visual intensity and emotional complexity. Through bold color, intricate texture, and unexpected materials, they stretch the familiar into the fantastical, offering new ways to experience what we think we know.
Ann Toebbe and JJ Manford are known for their maximalist, multimedia canvases that bend and flatten space with dizzying effect, while Lisha Bai’s boldly colored stitched collages, made from remnants of curtains and domestic fabrics, create layers of meaning.
Together, their work takes a surrealist approach to the theme of home, conjuring an American domesticity that is both recognizable and uncanny. Using disorienting perspectives, vibrant palettes, and densely layered material references, these artists compress and abstract domestic space into something strange—something extra.
Ann Toebbe’s meticulously rendered interiors transform middle-class domestic spaces into spatial tapestries—part memory, part structure, part symbol. Her flattened, often disorienting compositions speak to family, friendship, motherhood, and marriage, turning the rooms of her life into arenas of psychological and emotional resonance.
JJ Manford’s newest body of work, derived from collages, explores architectural interiors through a less literal, more compressed lens. The focus shifts from spatial logic to the interplay of objects and patterns—drawn from diverse sources but combined with deliberate, intuitive intent. The result is a visual language of associations, where each element is both a memory and a motif.
Lisha Bai’s stitched collages of windows that frame fauvist-like landscapes feel less observed than remembered. Sun setting through trees, a lavender moon just becoming visible, an orange sun hovering over chromatic mountains —these elemental impressions emerge through provisional layers of fabric and thread. With loose threads echoing dead branches, Bai’s work invites the viewer to toggle between pictorial illusion and physical materiality. Incorporating remnants from curtains she’s made for her own home, she blurs the boundary between the real and the represented.
In ExtraOrdinary, the domestic becomes anything but ordinary.