The Gallery at Machines with Magnets

The gallery at Machines with Magnets houses contemporary art, craft, design, installation, and multimedia exhibitions by emerging and underrepresented artists. Our mission is to provide a diverse group of creators with accessible, uncensored space.

Risks, Rituals, & Ruptures

Jane Hesser, Catherine LeComte Lecce, Ellen Shattuck Pierece, and Ellen Wetmore

October 9, 2025 to January 11, 2026

‘Risks, Rituals, & Ruptures’ brings together four artists who map reproduction and care—its risks, rituals, and ruptures—and the charged pause between what was and what will be. Across drawing, pattern, and photography, the works ask how we carry loss and continue to live inside the no-longer and the not-yet.

Jane Hesser Catherine LeComte Lecce Ellen Shattuck Pierce Ellen Wetmore

Submissions

The gallery is accepting exhibit proposals for 2026; please see our current submission guidelines.

The gallery is open during some public events and by appointment some Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Please contact us to request availability.

CONTACT

*RequiredName*Email*Confirm Email*Message*

Thanks for your interest in the gallery at Machines with Magnets!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Brouhaha: a Benefit for GRIN

October 2016

Brouhaha: a Benefit for GRIN

October 2016

Works by Maria Molteni, Katrina Ellis, Leah Piepgras, Pat Falco, Leslie Schomp, Catherine Hood, Scott Lawrence, Kate Drewniak, Katherine Wildman, Sandra Erbacher Ross, Normandin, Jennifer Avery, Andrea Lynn Santos, and Heather Leigh McPherson

We're throwing a party! Join us October 30 at Machines with Magnets for a Spooky Sunday full of music, costumes, performance, film & art! An evening with spooks and ghouls and dead guys, all while helping us out a little with our great big future plans? How can you say no! Volcano Kings Laila Aukee The Lazslos Mary Burke Tickets are $10 Come dressed to impress! Spooky decorations, costume contests with artist-made prizes, thematic beverages, and so many other great surprises in store! Artwork will be on exhibition and for sale in the Machines with Magnets gallery space for one night only! Stay tuned for a complete list of participating artists. This event is sponsored in part by The Providence Art + Design Film Festival, and Big Red & Shiny!

GRIN Volcano Kings Laila Aukee The Laszlos

View on Artland

Playpen

September 2016

Playpen

September 2016

Works by Fernando Pezzino and Vamba Bility

Physical objects, virtual customs, sociocultural structures, technology, and the myth-self filtered through cultural assimilation are explored in playpen, presenting the work of Fernando Pezzino and Vamba Bility. How we might navigate these complicated truths are performed through acts of play – expressive gestures teetering the line between haphazard and poignantly directed, and puzzle surfaces as a backdrop for layered dynamism together reveal questions about connectivity, cultural diaspora, and cultural bias. Bility and Pezzino question the social and cultural subsystems of our everyday, and re-imagine the larger structure as an enclosed environment growing smaller by the realities of technology, colonialism, urbanism and globalization. In playpen, the two artists reimagine the gallery as enclosed space where we may confront these questions.

Fernando Pezzino

View on Artland

Relative Ground

September 2016

Relative Ground

September 2016

Works by Devra Freelander, Leah Piepgras and Aimee Odum

Relative Ground is a group exhibition featuring Devra Freelander, Leah Piepgras and Aimee Odum curated by Corey Oberlander & Lindsey Stapleton that denotes the tension between an understanding of the world as governed by scientific principles and a sense of the world through lived experience. Through material exploration and immersive installation, these artists consider the human intervention that occurs during the exploration of events and phenomena.

Aimee Odum Devra Freelander Leah Piepgras GRIN

View on Artland

Relational Illusion

May 2016

Relational Illusion

May 2016

Works by Charity Enos and Barrett Kern

Charity is inspired by portraiture and the human form. Her illustrations are narratives exploring the intersection of modern evolution, science, nature, technology and religion across the plane of human interaction. Barrett makes large abstract steel sculptures with wood as an added element. He has also worked on refining his own visual and conceptual vocabulary, which has subsequently emerged through his focus on the points of intersection between architecture, sculpture, and spatial analysis. This opening will also feature a musical performence by Corey Stroffolino under his new project, Yoon Yung.

Charity Enos Barrett Kern

View on Artland

ORALLY / AURALLY / OH, REALLY?

May 2016

ORALLY / AURALLY / OH, REALLY?

May 2016

Works and music by Jason Curzake, Shey Rivera, Joan Wyand, Christopher Sadlers, Dial Painters, and Pretend It Didn't Happen

"We construct situations that investigate social pathologies, myths, and zones at work at “the show.” We aim to poke at and shift the audience’s understanding of why they are even here. To this end, we disorient and activate our audiences and ourselves through terrorization and explosion, despair and boredom. Our work is distinctly ethereal and absurd. Between the three of us, there is mutual trust in a certain set of implied boundaries, but the cracks are where the light shines through. We want to get to the core of the kind of rebellion that can reveal a fuller spectrum of being human: inexplicable, inimitable, highly sensory acts. Go down the up-escalator in a grocery cart while brushing your teeth with a lollipop. Because you have to."

Lorene Bouboushian Valerie Kuehne Joan Wyand Shey Rivera Christopher Sadlers

View on Artland

Obscura

May 2016

Obscura

May 2016

Works by Rhode Island College's Photo IV Class

Join the Rhode Island College Photo IV class for a fabulous event. Admission is free before 9 pm, $2.00 admission after 9. Enjoy refreshments, food, music, and of course beautiful photography. Friends, family, and anyone else interested in coming are welcome!

View on Artland

See Through Material

March 2016

See Through Material

March 2016

Here, The material is transparent, allowing sight to pass through it. It is also the vehicle through which we see. The works in see through material communicate through their material make-up. They infer context with their own inherent material qualities; in a way they are as much what they tell us as they are what we know already know about them. They are both their materials, and the images they represent – or is there a difference? Their material identities become the setting for their simultaneous representation of images or presences, inviting the viewer to, in a way, see through their material.

View on Artland

It Stays With You

February 2016

It Stays With You

February 2016

Works by Johnny Ray, Gyna Bootleg, Joseph Mauro

"IT STAYS WITH YOU" OPENING NIGHT: Sugar Pie - the love of self loathing. Johnny Ray and the Vomit Arsonist always bring it. Never to be assumed. Gyna Bootleg- Queen of the Gutter, Empress of Filth. Honda Civic - three lawyers trying to bum you out. Camden Healy - guitar, Miles Lacouture - bass, Joseph Mauro, -drums. Invisible Robot Hands - experimental, electronic, delving into the daily struggle and never doing the same thing twice. 'It Stays With You' is a photography and mixed media show based around a small group of artists using sexuality and self deprecation to care for their ever present mental and physical plagues. New Solo and collaborative works by Johnny Ray, Gyna Bootleg, & Joseph Mauro.

Gyna Bootleg Invisible Robot Hands

View on Artland

7 / 12