mixed emotions
foster the studio x homesown x caitlinstudioart
GrowHouse| brooklyn ny| july 2025
the COVID-19 pandemic offered many of us an unfamiliar emotional landscape. grief coexisted with gratitude, isolation with intimacy, hope with uncertainty. for a brief moment, emotional complexity became a shared reality. yet as workplaces reopened, routines resumed, and attention shifted toward recovery, we rarely paused to consider what it meant to hold so many emotions at once.
mixed emotions returns to the emotional complexity the pandemic brought into focus. bringing together new work by emerging artists miela foster, unique hodge, and caitlin jones, the exhibition explores the many ways emotions coexist, evolve, and transform, inviting viewers to dwell in emotional complexity rather than rush toward resolution.
the exhibition is grounded in the idea of emotional polyculture:
the understanding that emotional growth depends not on cultivating a single desirable emotion, but on sustaining a rich diversity of emotional experiences.
just as ecosystems thrive on biodiversity, emotional growth is sustained by a diversity of emotions: the interaction of many feelings rather than the dominance of any one feeling.
rather than asking visitors to resolve emotional complexity, mixed emotions invites them to recognize it as the very condition from which resilience, growth, and connection emerge.
this show is a collaborative group exhibition produced by miela foster, unique hodge, & caitlin jones, it features both original and collaborative work, and was generously hosted GrowHouse Design & Development Group, a community design & development cooperative headquartered in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn NY.
a framework for emotional complexity:
mixed emotions its centered around an alternative framework to give us a language and set of tools to unpack our emotional transformations via the COVID-19 pandemic, and allow us a space to value that emotional growth and use it to develop deeper empathy and compassion for ourselves & each other. please see graphic.
across all of these states, the same is true: emotions don’t take turns. they coexist & interact rather than resolving into a single feeling. a flourishing inner life depends on diversity, mirroring nature in many ways. an ecosystem stays healthy not through any one species, but through the rich web of interactions between many different ones.
framework is foster the studio copyright.
