The Beginning Before the Beginning

May 1 – 31, 2026

Angela Conant and Laura Frantz

Curated by Elisa Soliven-Gerber

Opening reception: May 1st from 6-8pm

Press Release

Underdonk is pleased to present a two-person show with Angela Conant and Laura Frantz. Please join us for the opening reception on May 1, 2026 from 6-8pm. The exhibition will be on view from May 1-May 30, 2026, curated by Elisa Soliven-Gerber.

“In the beginning,” the story goes, “we sculpted them out of mud. Male and female we created them,” the story adds, and that much is true enough. Some we made concave and some convex, some sires and some dams, and so on through the entire created universe -- black and white, up and down, hot and cold, real and imaginary, inside and out. We found this to be a simple and reliable system and, once the different dyads began interacting with one another, a surprisingly various one -- as when a “man” commits “evil” to gain “more” of something “valuable,” or loses himself in “pairings” with “imaginary” “women,” or conceives his own system and rushes to tell “his” “fellow” “men” how to “please” “God” and reach “heaven.” What the stories no longer say outright, though it’s certainly still implied, is that there’s always a beginning before the beginning, and that in that prior beginning, we carved her out of stone. Building with mud may have been too easy. Shapes appeared at once, offering the deceptive pleasure of simple contrasts and encouraging artist and creature alike to think superficially. But marble already contains all the forms you could ever carve from it, and it slows your hand on every stroke as if expressly to remind you of that fact. Instead of male parts or female, inside or out, the person we made of stone had curves that evoked possibilities. In the beginning before the beginning, we had sex without difference, space without distance, shape without limit, time without change. And, of course, though the language of opposites struggles to say it outright, we had beginnings without endings, which means that the person we made of stone is as present as ever. If you look carefully, you can see her under every discrete “man” or “woman:” the sinew of a back that can turn this way or that, the depressions and hollows that dapple the head, the bump and cavity between the legs. You can see her in the curve of the horizon, in the flash of the weather, in the pattern of the trees. And indeed, once you know how to look, you will see her in plaster just as easily as in stone, in a painting as easily as in a sculpture, in an idea or an object, a moment or an age. You will see her in the mirror, too, in me and in yourself, in all of us together and each of us alone, in the sticky pairs of opposites we pull out of the everything and in the sheer, mysterious presence that still so clearly underlies what we purport to distinguish as “still” or “moving,” “organic” or “inanimate,” “living” or “dead.” She is present, too, in the artist no less than in her creature, since in the beginning before the beginning, we created ourselves.--Will Heinrich

Images: Laura Frantz, "Ear to the Ground", 2026, Oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches. Angela Conant, "The Ins and Outs" 2023, Connemara marble, wood and latex, 15 x 26 x 18 inches.

Laura Frantz (b. 1981 Beirut, Lebanon) is a painter based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at the Hunter College Project Space, Brooklyn Art Cluster, Long Island University (NYC), the Pelham Art Center (Pelham, NY), and Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), among others. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Shandaken Project and Joshua Tree Highlands, and a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Ankara, Turkey. She holds a BA in History from Grinnell College and an MFA in Painting from CUNY Hunter College, where she currently works and teaches art.

Angela Conant (b. 1982). Conant’s work has been shown at Swivel Gallery (Saugerties, NY), Electronic Arts Intermix (New York, NY), EFA Project Space (New York, NY), Planthouse (New York, NY), SPRING/BREAK art show (New York, NY); Glasshouse Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Interstate Projects (Brooklyn, NY); the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (Wilmington, DE), Neter (Mexico City, MX), The Sunview Luncheonette (Brooklyn, NY), ICA Baltimore (Baltimore, MD), La Mama Gallery (New York City), SARDINE (Brooklyn, NY), Galerie René Blouin (Montreal, QC). She was awarded residencies at Recess (Critical Writing), Millay Arts, The Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Cill Rialaig Arts Center, the School of Visual Arts, Home School Hudson and Shandaken Paint School. She earned a BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2004, and an MFA in Art Practice from School of Visual Arts in 2013. and has an Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies from Hunter College as of 2023. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Fine Art at Pratt Institute.

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