House / Hold

GearBox Gallery
House / Hold
Featuring artists: Laura Van Duren and Mittie Cuetara
Dates: December 11, 2025- January 17, 2026
Reception: Saturday, December 13, 1-4 pm
Artist’ Talk: Saturday, January 10, 2pm

GearBox Gallery is pleased to present House/Hold, featuring GearBox Gallery artist
Mittie Cuetara and guest artist Laura Van Duren.
Laura Van Duren and Mittie Cuetara share a sensitivity to how architecture informs our human experience. Laura’s sculptures work through the physicality of form—playful, visceral structures that illuminate the body’s influence on the mind, embracing a deeply corporeal sensibility. Mittie’s paintings, by contrast, explore psychological space through slightly abstracted interior scenes, where domestic tension gathers in shadows,
thresholds, and doorways. While Laura builds outward from the tangible presence of
bodies, Mittie draws viewers inward to the charged quiet of domestic environments.
Cuetara’s work begins inside- slightly skewed dreamlike interiors act as metaphors for the body, exploring the tension, comfort, resistance, and pull of her shifting relationship to domesticity.
Cuetara is drawn to the friction between independence and belonging, ambition and
home. The house becomes a shell and an identity—a container for contradictory desires.
The interiors she paints aren’t pristine; their meaning comes from their histories. Rooms bear the imprint of lives lived, and doorways recur as thresholds of change, marking our hesitation before the unfamiliar.
House/Hold reflects this pause—the moment before transformation. Through these
spaces, she explores the house as an extension of the self: a site of memory, conflict,
vulnerability, and possibility.
In House/Hold, Van Duren navigates the complexities of support systems—those that
can feel uprooted and unsteady, even as they are built back up through collective
persistence. Through chairs and sculptural forms, the work examines the interwoven
issues of housing instability, community support, and resilience amid our shifting political reality.
Swollen ceramic pieces stride forward, precariously balanced on wheels, nozzles, and cobbled-together chairs, illustrating a narrative of collective effort and adaptive repair.
This pieced-together community becomes both vulnerable and resilient, emphasizing
that real stability and shelter are created not alone, but through interconnected acts of
care, ingenuity, and shared endurance. The installation considers how support is
made—and remade—together.
About the Artists:
Mittie Cuetara grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As the daughter of an architect, she’s always been drawn to the particular interiors and strange paths that humans create for themselves. Graduating from the Boston Museum school, she moved to the Bay Area, where she wrote and illustrated several children’s books, then spent several years teaching art. Since receiving her MFA in 2022 from Mills college, she has been showing her acrylic paintings and sculptural work at shows around the Bay Area. She joined Gearbox Gallery in 2024.
Laura Van Duren is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California, recognized for her innovative approach to ceramics, and mixed-media sculpture. Her practice often
merges drawing, ceramics, glycerin soap, and recycled materials, reflecting a
commitment to experimentation and abstraction. She works with the Peter Voulkos
family helping to manage the archival aspect of his collection which has had a profound influence on her creative process.
Van Duren’s work has been exhibited at major institutions across the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Crocker Museum (as part of the feminist exhibition Making Moves), Sonoma Museum of Art, Southern Exposure, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Berkeley Art Center. She is dedicated to arts education, teaching ceramics and sculpture as an adjunct professor at several community colleges. Her achievements in the field include residencies, such as the Open Studio residency at Haystack in Maine (2023) and a 2025 residency at Dream Farm Commons Gallery in Oakland. Notably, her work has been acquired by The Crocker Art Museum.
Van Duren holds a BFA in drawing from Carnegie Mellon University and she completed her MFA in sculpture at San Francisco State University in 2017.
GearBox Gallery’s Opening Reception for Mittie Cuetara and Laura Van Duren’s
House/Hold will be Saturday, December 13th, 1-4pm All are welcome.
About Gearbox Gallery:
GearBox Gallery is an artist-run contemporary art gallery dedicated to showcasing the work of its members and a broad range of regional contemporary guest artists, fostering community and education through intellectual and cultural exchange focused on the visual arts. We are located at 770 West Grand Avenue in Oakland, California.