HP Galleries is excited to announce the line-up for the 2025 “Serva Pool Flux” exhibition series. Serva Pool Flux, or SPF, was designed as an opportunity for artists and curators to exhibit in a pop-up style format in the Holland Project’s Serva Pool space. An open call for applications was announced in early 2025, and a committee of local artists and cultural workers selected proposals that aimed to exhibit brand-new work. The inaugural SPF exhibition will be on May 23rd, with pop-ups happening through September.
#01 Copper Ouroboros by Christopher Lynn
In the inaugural HPG Serva Pool Flux exhibition, Ohio-based artist Christopher Lynn reflects on themes of labor and a troubling legacy of mining and capitalism. The exhibition, which includes video, sculpture, painting, and sound, “Copper Ouroboros”, will be on view for one night and one day, with an opening in conjunction with the reception for “inauditx (unheard)” in the HP Gallery on Friday, May 23rd from 7-10:30 pm. Additional hours include 10 am-3 pm on Saturday, May 24th, during the Mini•Mart Artist Market.
The Ringing Rocks, located in Butte, Montana, “sing” when struck with hammers. This lithophonic phenomenon is only found in a few spots on the planet, and the artist Christopher Lynn made the journey to Butte in 2023 to witness and record it. Those recordings found a home when Lynn learned of “New Songs for Butte Mining Camp,” a songbook for protesting miners published in 1917 when a clash between companies and workers came to a head. In his video works, Lynn depicts the rocks and nearby landscape, and overlays those images with sheets from the little, yellow songbook that gave miners a single voice as they marched. Videos also show vignettes of Butte history around mining, union organizing, Evel Knievel, corporate assassinations, and the death of snow geese in the Berkeley Pit – a defunct mining pit near the Rocks that has killed thousands of birds through its tainted waters. A motion-activated sound installation also plays the protest songs mixed with samples from the Rocks – as if the earth sings for the miners long buried, warding off any capitalists. Paintings made of sulfuric acid and copper oxide reference the heavy metals and mining byproducts present in the Pit, and the project continues to evolve and grow through sound and performance.
#02 near wild heaven curated by kit ortega + autumn loewen
Near Wild Heaven is a multi media exhibition of regional artists considering the histories, dreamscapes, and analyses of Queer Utopias in Northern Nevada and The Bay Area. In the early 1970’s, fresh from the memory of Stonewall, the Alpine Liberation Front out of San Francisco sought to build a community for queer people in Alpine County. Later, during the height of the AIDS crisis, Reno locals pursued the same dream in trying to establish Stonewall Park. While both projects ultimately failed, we’re left with the knowledge that yearning for freedom and queer liberation in the west was shared across generations, and continues to be. These yearnings also highlight the fault of seeking a utopia on stolen land, and the tensions that arise in the intersectionalities of liberation. The American West and its dreams and miscalculations have often been depicted through traditional landscape painting. In Near Wild Heaven, a literal interpretation of landscape art was forgoed for work that relates to the cultural and queer landscape of Northern Nevada. Through this, the curators seek to find what artists in this region dream of, as an ode to the wayward spirit of Queer Utopia, and with its faults in mind.
#03 POURS FROM A CRACKED VESSEL BY D. STEVENS
The series consists of framed mixed-media collages and sculptural pieces. Stevens’ art depicts, in slightly jovial ways, how we are misled to trust in a disingenuous system, believing what we consume is not intended to harm us, when in fact, the Necrostate wants us dead. Extraction, the destruction of nature to advance technology, weaponization of food as well as the water used to grow it, is more blatant with each passing day. Victims are blamed for their own suffering, exacerbated by a cruel, colonial agenda.
D. Stevens admires the way artists like Niki de Saint Phalle are able to process complex emotion & pain by producing exuberant work. She said, “There is nothing more shocking than joy”. While the artist doesn’t entirely agree with that statement, Stevens does aspire to find & create joy as an act of defiance.
Papier mache’ is D. Stevens’ current, preferred medium. It’s a fabulous way to use what would otherwise become trash. Collage is also well-suited, due to diverse materials & texture relevant to a background in hair, special fx & prop styling. Collage is assembled from reworked sketches & scraps cut from old work, layered with paint, inks & graphite. A zero-waste ethos is applied to practice whenever possible.
#04 The Museum of Señor Babyhead BY Analisa Raya-Flores
The Museum of Señor Babyhead is an installation and immersive physical theater performance by writer, performer, and visual artist Analisa Raya-Flores, and part of Holland Project’s Serva Pool Flux exhibition series. The gallery will be filled with pâpier-maché “artifacts”– reproductions of items found in the Sonoran Desert (water bottles, broken rosaries, the skulls of hawks and goats). In the live show, Señor Babyhead reenacts his journey across the desert, sharing his encounters with mirages, spirits, and saguaros. Who is Señor Babyhead, you ask? Only Mexico’s most washed up famous sitcom star, desperate to stay relevant and avoid becoming an artifact, himself. It’s an hour of crooning, crawling, and implicating the audience in a dangerous game.
#05 ARBORGLYPH BY Bridget Conway & Benjamin Stevens
We invite you to ARBORGLYPH, an afternoon of sculpture, painting, and textile work by Bridget Conway and Benjamin Stevens. This project presents new work that reacts to the idea of domestic space, craft, and nature as a lived environment. By creating an environment for abstraction, the artists prioritize the experience of the viewer to understand the objective of the pieces on their own terms and encourage thinking about concepts like use & usefulness, work & play, labor & rest.
#06 The Last Supper BY Summer Ester Orr
The Last Supper is a free ceramic exhibition & pop-up banquet experience that invites participants to share a locally-sourced meal utilizing entirely functional dinnerware made by hand – from candlestick to wine goblet. These adorned objects present a world created piece by piece, one which exalts life on Earth and the delicate systems currently at risk.
Summer Ester Orr (b. 1996) is a Honduran-American ceramicist, object-maker, and educator living in the rural West. Informed by post-industrial revolution craft movements, folk art and a “back to the land” ethos, Orr’s objects are rooted in simple whimsy, storytelling and introspection. They offer a way to connect with place, ecological memory, and the natural world while also retaining functionality. The vessels strive to give a moment of peace to the beholder… as in the soft exclamation when one sees a small animal moving throughout the landscape. The wood & soda-fired surfaces are adorned with various illustrative techniques like sgraffito, stamps, inlay, and purposeful wadmarking.
#07 HOLD YOUR POWER BY ELENA DE LA PAZ & JAKE MAYNARD
The exhibition, Hold Your Power, is a collaborative two-person show by artists and community organizers, Elena de la Paz and Jake Maynard, imagining a better future rooted in justice, peace, prosperity, and community.
#08 I LOVE AMERICA… BY PAOLA BRAGADO LEON
I love América, América loves me is a pop-up exhibition by artist Paola Bragado and the last of the Serva Pool Flux summer 2025 series. Bragado’s artistic practice has always been linked to places of passage: spaces and cities that she has temporarily inhabited and shared spaces with other women. Her work is made up of portraits of nomadic women, whose lives are associated with precariousness, migration, and unequal working conditions. Women who are stigmatized because of their gender, profession, or place of origin.
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