Saturday Sessions

Scott Hocking and Gareth Lichty in Conversation

Join the Medina Triennial for a conversation between two artists who share a deep commitment to place, materiality, and the life of neglected or underused spaces. Both rooted in the Great Lakes and Rust Belt geography—Hocking in Detroit, Lichty in the Buffalo orbit—they bring complementary perspectives on what it means to work site-specifically with materials that already carry history. Hocking's practice tends toward the archaeological and narrative, assembling monumental structures from salvaged materials found in abandoned industrial sites, while Lichty's work leans more botanical and ecological—but the underlying sensibility is close: a careful, transformative attention to post-industrial landscapes that is neither nostalgic nor elegiac. In conversation, the two artists will explore how rural and urban post-industrial landscapes differ, what ecology and industry share, and how place shapes the work that emerges from it.

Scott Hocking (b. 1975, Detroit, MI) creates site-specific installations, sculptures, large-scale public artworks, and photography objects, often using found materials and neglected locations. His work focuses on transfomation, ephemerality, chance, the cycles of natyre, and patterns of human behavior through time—always rooted in deep research into the history of each site, its people, and its layers over time. Over the past thirty years, Hocking has created more than forty large-scale sculptural installations and public artworks, exhibited at dozens of museums and institutions worldwide, and received over twenty awards, fellowships, and grants. He has lived and worked in Detroit since 1996.

Gareth Lichty (b. 1980, London, Ontario; lives and works in Buffalo, NY) is a sculptor whose large-scale installations explore the internal and external architecture of space, working with field tape, construction fencing, and other industrial materials to create works that are simultaneously disorienting and precise. His past projects have engaged grain silos, gallery interiors, and public spaces across Europe, New Zealand, China, and North America. Lichty received his MFA from SUNY Buffalo and has exhibited internationally for over two decades.