About

A Whisper Campaign
A whisper is not always a secret. Sometimes it's a suggestion, a cue, or an offering. A whisper implies intimacy, a closeness between speaker and listener. But it also implies distance—something overheard, elusive, hard to grasp. A whisper can spread without origin, carried ear to ear, image to image. It’s persistent, gentle, and full of tension.

A whisper can be the start of something—a ruffled mumble of quiet, a voice not yet certain of itself. Whispers are tentative expressions of possibilities. Whispers can carry with them the strength of thousands or the whimper of a dying effort.

In A Whisper Campaign, artists Jacqueline Overby and Lana Waldrep Appl probe the subtle yet insistent presence of whispers—those quiet, context-rich messages that challenge us to listen more closely. The exhibition explores what is peripheral, ambient, and often ignored, making space for what typically fades into the background. Whispers are messages that you have to work to receive. You have to lean in and choose to hear. Whispers do not demand your attention, they appeal to curiosity. They provoke your attention.

Like gossip—originated in the Old English word "god-sibb," meaning "godparent" or a close female friend—whispers can travel along invisible networks, misunderstood or mischaracterized by dominant power structures. What began as god-sibb, meaning close kin or confidante, was reshaped by patriarchal forces into something idle, immoral, and feminine in all the wrong ways. But gossip, like whispering, is not inherently harmful. It can also be an act of care, resistance, or solidarity—a way to connect, share, and survive. This exhibition asks: what do we lose when we dismiss what is quiet? What truths are carried by the whispers we overlook?

Overby’s sculptures gesture toward bodies, but remain unnameable—like half-remembered dreams. Stitched and suspended, their plush surfaces and bulbous forms pull from the language of toys and childhood aesthetics, but carry with them an adult unease. They flirt with familiarity, only to resist it. Drawing on influences from cartoons, gendered archetypes, and the surreal tension of body dysmorphia, her work whispers rather than declares. Meaning unfolds here not in clarity, but in suggestion—in hints, innuendos, and incomplete forms. Her palette, at once saccharine and venomous, evokes the warning colors of poisonous creatures—an instinctual alert dressed in sweetness. The act of felting, of stabbing fiber into shape, becomes a method of quiet confrontation, a slow reckoning with intrusive thoughts, humor, and harm. Like gossip passed between trusted mouths, these objects transmit discomfort and care in equal measure, asking us to sit with the unresolved, the ambiguous, the charged.
Waldrep Appl’s work has long highlighted the beauty and complexity of the seemingly simple and ignorable—the quiet. Her latest paintings feature arrangements of the objects that fill her periphery—her husband’s handmade ceramics both broken and unbroken, bits and pieces of her children’s discarded toys, utilitarian objects rendered ambiguous through their decontextualized unuse, single use plastic, and so many plants living and dead. This pairing of the immortal with the mortal draw attention to the omnipresence of time. It is a slow drone and easily overlooked, but we are bound to it. The most beautiful and meaningful things are often impermanent. Plastic trash, frustratingly, lives forever. All of the objects are rendered life size. They feature scrapes and scratches and piped on impasto. They are insistent in their physicality. They speak to your body. They remind of your own physicality, and consequently, your own impermanence

Together, Overby and Waldrep Appl construct a murmured dialogue—a soft call and response that hums with tension, resonance, and memory. A Whisper Campaign invites viewers to consider what it means to listen closely, and how power can move—not through volume, but through persistence, repetition, and care.

A Whisper Campaign by Jacqueline Overby and Lana Waldrep Appl
Exhibition Dates: May 23rd - June 21st
Opening Reception: Friday, May 23rd 7-10 pm
Third Thursday East Austin Arts District hours/ Artist Talk: June 19th 6-9pm