Current work
Siting Ritual
Holding Renewal, Inscribing Resilience
On exhibit June 10 - July 18, 2026 at Akron Soul Train / 191 S Main St, Akron, OH 44308
Siting Ritual explores the transformative power of everyday rituals—washing, eating, and gathering—as acts that sustain cultural identity across generations. Through sculptural soaps, etched tablescapes, and material experimentation, Scavnicky creates what she describes as “soft architectures,” objects that exist both in intimate and within communal space.
Her work draws on a range of historical and cultural frameworks, including bell hooks’ concept of the Black homeplace as a site of resistance and care, as well as the legacy of spatial injustice during the Jim Crow era. These references inform a practice that bridges the intimate and collective, asking how ordinary gestures can carry both trauma and resilience.
Through this work, Scavnicky invites viewers to reconsider how daily acts of care and connection become powerful expressions of memory, cultural presence, and belonging.
the knock, knocks
At the scale of a keepsake, these doors hold the spatial logic of homeplace as experienced by the artist throughout her childhood. Visitors are invited to open the doors for a peek inside of her mindscape.
digital collage prints / wood doors, 24" × 36", 2026
site of resilience
A tablescape that is also an urbanscape, built from the tools and signage used to segregate space across the Jim Crow South. Look closely and those elements emerge throughout—yet the meal grows up through and settles within that architecture, bread and greens and water taking root in the structures meant to exclude. A record of a community that survived these obstacles and found ways to thrive within them.
mixed media sculpture, 30” x 96”, 2026
Two relief panels read as terrain seen from above—a field of raised marks where time, life, and landscape register as topography. The surface holds the record of a life lived in motion: rituals settling into place, then disrupted, remembered, and restarted; paths folding, shifting, rerouting toward the unexpected.
A Field of Rituals and Reckonings
acrylic + foam relief on canvas, 48” x 48” / 12” x 24”, 2026
site of renewal
The sink stands as the first threshold of return—where the outside world is rinsed from the hands before the day is set down.
mixed media sculpture, 30” x 30” x 42”, 2026
site of renewal talismans
The most ordinary ritual—washing—becomes a small daily act of renewal, the talisman dissolving into the body's care over time.
shea butter soap, 4” x 3.5”, 2026
A Homeplace in Slivers
Each sliver is a domestic detail held against forgetting, a counter-archive of the objects and surfaces that carry a household's memory. Gathered together, they reconstruct the room not as it was but as it is remembered: in pieces yet whole.
digital collage dye-sublimation print, 36" × 72", 2026