Intimate Monument
Date: September 4, 2026 - December 24, 2026
Gallery: Gamble Family Gallery
Intimate Monument brings together artists Katina Bitsicas, Desiree Moore, Kristin Roles, John Steck Jr., and Eszter Sziksz in an exploration of grief, memory, and the enduring impulse to create in the face of loss.
Across time and cultures, art has served as a vessel for mourning. While remembrance is often imagined through grand public monuments, it is just as often found in quieter gestures: a handmade altar, a roadside memorial, a treasured object, or an artwork born from absence. These intimate acts of creation become sites where private sorrow intersects collective with memory.
Working across a range of approaches such as photography, installation, video and sculpture, the artists consider how loss is carried, transformed, and shared. Intimate Monument reflects on art’s capacity to hold remembrance, giving form to what cannot be preserved, and creating space where personal grief resonates beyond the individual.
Katina Bitsicas Bio
Katina Bitsicas is a Greek-American new media artist who utilizes video, installation, projection mapping, BioArt, EcoArt, photography, and performance in her artworks to translate grief, the archive, and memory through material, microscopic, and digital tools. Her works bridge an interdisciplinary connection between the arts and sciences, combining found materials and archives with photographic and microscopic imagery of natural ecosystems. Decay is reinterpreted through the lens of nature’s cyclical processes and then paralleled with grief, further exploring the science of decay and its relationship to material history. She has exhibited worldwide, including The Armory Show, Candela Books + Gallery, Plexus Projects, Wheaton Biennial curated by Legacy Russell, CADAF: Digital Art Month Paris, Torrance Art Museum, Hatch Art Center, Eye’s Walk Festival, 57th Dimitria Festival in Thessaloniki, HereArt, Art in Odd Places Orlando, Digital Graffiti Festival, Indie Memphis Film Festival, St. Louis International Film Festival, and New Orleans Film Festival. In 2022, her artist book Luci: The Girl with Four Hearts was published with Flower Press. Notable residencies include Open Air Media Festival, University of Arkansas-Fort Smith Windgate AiR, UCSF Library, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prairie Ronde, and Hinge Arts at the Kirkbride. Katina received her BA from Kalamazoo College, Post-Bacc from SACI Florence, Italy, and MFA from the University of South Florida. She is an Associate Professor in the Media School and affiliate faculty in the Environment, Society, and Sustainability Institute at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Desireé Moore Bio
Desireé Moore is an interdisciplinary storyteller working across film, installation, and socially engaged art. Blending non-fiction, memory, and vernacular lore, her archive-driven practice explores sites of personal and public loss.
Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally at venues including The Momentary, The Armory, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, FotoFocus Biennial, Wassaic Project, Aesthetica Film Festival, the Berlin Indie Film Festival, and the Borscht Film Festival. Her creative practice has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Missouri Humanities, the True/False Film Festival, the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Currently based in Columbia, MO, she is an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Kristin Roles Bio
Kristen recently relocated from Tampa to Albuquerque, where they continue to make pictures of the distances within communication.
Through the subjectivities of stewardship, they hope to become a prism for another’s archive and memory.
Kristen completed their MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2018 and has since facilitated photo courses at the University of South Carolina, the University of Tampa, and the University of South Florida, where they served as Visiting Assistant Professor for the 2024-2025 academic year. Kristen has been in residence with the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS for applied grief and bereavement research (London) and the School of Making Thinking (NY) to explore texts somatically and collaboratively. Their work has been shared online and in print. Recent exhibitions include Good Samaritans, a 10-years posthumous curation of Jaroslaw Studencki’s last body of work (2025); You Again and Me for the First Time with Tatiana Mesa Paján and Becca Wahl (2025); When Do We Decide to Give It All Away? with Patrick Carew (2024); and Desiring Production, curated by Jocelyn Chase (2023), all in Tampa. In 2021, Kristen co-curated an exhibition, Bodies for Scale (This Has Happened Many Times Before), at Goodyear Arts in Charlotte, NC, wherein the bridges between us did, in fact, hold.
John Steck Jr. Bio
John Steck Jr. is a visual artist and educator from Chicago, IL, currently residing in Baltimore, MD. He is a maker of photographic and ephemeral objects. Using light-sensitive emulsions and experimental processes, he creates images that fade or form over time, addressing our complex relationship with memory, time, and impermanence.
Steck has exhibited in 20 states and 7 countries. In the summer of 2026, he presented his project, In Search of Lost Lakes, at the Time & Entanglement conference of the International Society for the Study of Time, hosted at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia. His work was also featured in an accompanying exhibition at the University Museum of Contemporary Arts and Cultures in Cagliari. His recent solo exhibition, Come to Life, Again, took place in 2025 at the Norco Gallery Art Gallery in Norco, California. This exhibition highlighted five bodies of work, spanning over 12 years of his artistic practice. Steck has been featured in over fifty publications, including “The Art of Letting Go: An Interview with Two Ephemeral Artists” in Art21 Magazine. He has attended artist residencies in Iceland, Ireland, Canada, Spain, and throughout the United States, including the Vermont Studio Center, Hatch Projects, and Latitude Artist Residency. He is also a member of the International Society for the Study of Time.
Steck is a first-generation graduate who received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. He also earned a Professional Program Certificate from the New England School of Photography and, before that, attended Wright Community College in Chicago. Steck is currently in his eleventh year as an educator and holds the positions of Photography Coordinator and Senior Lecturer for the Program for Visual Arts at Johns Hopkins University.
Eszter Sziksz Bio
Eszter Sziksz is a Hungarian artist whose work brings together printmaking, installation, sculpture, and video to explore memory, presence, and human connection. Many of her projects invite participation from the audience, allowing the work to unfold through physical interaction and shared experience. She has lived and worked internationally, with projects spanning Europe, Asia, and the United States.
Her work has been featured in exhibitions such as Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration at the Sarasota Art Museum, the International Print Triennial in Poland, the Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial, juried by Elizabeth Rudy of the Harvard Art Museums, and the upcoming Human/Nature: Envisioning the Environment at the Castellani Art Museum (2026–27). In fall 2026 she will present her first museum-level solo exhibition at the Sarasota Art Museum.
She is the recipient of the Halo Arts Project Fellowship (2026), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant(2024), and a Puffin Foundation Grant (2023), and received the Prix de Print Award from Art in Print magazine, where her work was featured on the cover.
Eszter earned her MFA from Memphis College of Art and her Doctorate in Liberal Arts (DLA) from the University of Pécs, Hungary. She teaches Fine Arts/Printmaking at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida.
