Back in April, Winooski artist Corrine Yonce, 34, received Burlington City Arts’ 2025 Diane Gabriel Visual Artist Award — a prestigious honor that marks an artist as one to follow. She said then that it would help her complete work for her solo show at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, N.H. That exhibition, “Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing,” opened last weekend in AVA’s spacious main gallery, alongside excellent solo shows by Misoo Bang, Mike Howat and Cierra Vigue, all of which run through September 27 and are well worth the trip to the Upper Valley.
Yonce has worked in housing advocacy for years and experienced housing instability herself. Her work is informed by ideas about the meaning of “home,” which she describes in her artist’s statement as “close, specific, and familiar, yet often disrupted and falling apart.”
That description fits the physical and formal qualities of her paintings and assemblages, too. They are for the most part bright and loud, incorporating everything from cardboard to broken tile to pipe insulation foam. But where those materials might seem clunky or chaotic in another artist’s hands, Yonce pulls them back to something a little demure: a still life of flowers or a portrait on panel that feels quiet and intimate, though it may be neon-green or orange.
Throughout the show, Yonce’s palette pulls compositions together where they might otherwise become incoherent.
A cluster of three small works illustrates Yonce’s focus on these little moments. “She curled like a noodle in a clam shell (mini),” “harvesting backyard elderberry” and “Luxury bath during COVID” all combine drawing (crayon, pencil, marker) with acrylic paint and collage on panels. The collaged pieces are prints of Yonce’s own sketches, as though she’s testing them out to see if this is where they want to live. The works are all at least somewhat figurative, with hands and legs and a sketch of someone washing dishes making appearances. But they harmonize because of the way she uses color.
Yellow and orange blocks interrupt a range of greens and blues, including a mint-green wall shelf supporting the panel “Luxury bath.” Together, they create an overarching composition that draws focus to the turn of a hand, a leg over the edge of a bathtub — everyday domestic snippets, easily missed but for the artist’s attention.
Yonce uses other versions of the mint-green shelf — some seem repurposed from holding tchotchkes — to reinforce notions of home. “Everything but the kitchen sink” rests on one: a scene of floppy black-eyed Susans presented in a loopy 10-by-10-inch cutout cardboard frame glommed over with lumpy paint the color of viscera. The scene’s emerald green depicts stems or window frames or trees in the view beyond. Those elements meld together abstractly, with highlights that pop against the deep red.
Nearby, “He wouldn’t buy me flowers, but would only let me grow them,” at 24 by 24 inches, is a more solid version of the same scene. The flowers literally stand out: painted, cut out of one canvas and collaged to another. This time the frame appears to be a wooden window sash, hardware attached, a neon-orange edge visible under dark green. Yonce’s repetition of the flowers, through collage in this piece and other works in the show, reads as a memory she keeps revisiting.
Yonce conveys feeling and narrative with her titles, which often give the viewer a handhold into more abstract works. Case in point: “Time did that thing where it collapsed like a bad cake,” a dimensional assemblage of plaster gauze, insulation foam, cardboard and collage, resting atop two wall pegs. Two hands cradle the rest of the sculpture, which includes squashed odds and ends — a bit of painter’s tape, part of a poster — that vividly suggest the titular collapse.
Yonce’s facility with found materials comes through clearly in the sculptural relief “Hold me like tomorrow,” 27 by 36 by 9 inches. Its bottom portion is a shelf covered in broken beige and white tile that looks like it could have come from a public restroom. The top portion is a rounded bundle made largely from bits of foam pillow stuffing, congealed into a solid mass with resin. From the center of all this emerges a painting of a face and hands on a flat panel, as though in the middle of a hug.
Yonce carries color from the tile and foam portions (yellows, blues, beiges) into the painting, making the sections visually coherent yet still distinct. The unusual materials get to revel in their weirdness, the foam somehow both sparkling and gross, without overwhelming the tender image.
Portraiture plays a role in the show, especially in the 4-by-3-foot “the tough swallow: enduring wounds don’t mean ya won’t give ’em.” A central figure sits, cigarette in hand, swathed in a puffer coat, paintings leaning against a wall in the background. The person’s hot red face with yellow highlights is inscrutable, the coat like armor but sketched with the arabesques of a graffiti tag. The sitter, whoever they are, takes up a lot of real estate on the canvas, and perhaps in the artist’s head.
Yonce lets herself sprawl with the 58-by-65-inch “Ham sandwich,” painted on an unstretched cut-out canvas. A loose depiction of an arm reaches toward a sandwich and sketchbook on the table. Text appears to one side, some of it photo-transferred on and backward. The perspective is wacky, the hand grotesque, the text about the sandwich both hard to read and banal. Yet this is a totally compelling piece that flips the viewer in and out between abstract and real space. Like many of the smaller works, it resembles memory — some details well defined, others lost.
Throughout the show, Yonce’s palette pulls compositions together where they might otherwise become incoherent. Her reused materials offer inherent hope tinged with a little brokenness. The boldness and fragility of it all might just hit you right where you live.
“Corrine Yonce: Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing,” on view through September 27 at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, N.H.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Home, Sweet Home | Corrine Yonce’s brash, sensitive works explore memory and place”
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2 2025.
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