There is a common throughline in the works in this exhibition that achieve immediacy, impact, and simultaneity through the elimination of aesthetic and psychic distance. With less distance implied in a work, the ‘primary process’ of instinct and impulse is emphasized. Most of these works have minimal foreground and background pictorially. They also do not have a distinction of sequence–beginning, middle, or end–and collapse the boundaries between mediums. 

Clement Oladipo’s sculptural works are an embodiment of nature’s materiality and environmental influence on human existence. Sourcing objects like wood, twine, and oxidized metals from the streets of Brooklyn, Oladipo is breathing reimagined importance back into the everyday by elevating and finding new life in seemingly mundane materials that surround us.

Orli Swergold’s paper pulp assemblages operate in a space between painting and sculpture, evoking the body to create structures that are both strange and familiar. By sourcing and reimagining organic materials, Swergold’s work considers the interplay of bodily existence in a realm of constant human interaction, both through intimacy and isolation. Bright, plastic-like colors cover textural surfaces, harking back to the colorfields of childhood and play.

In Debbi Kenote’s sculptural shaped canvas paintings, bright colors and fanciful shapes proliferate while dancing through space and form. With imagery that links to both the body and landscape, Kenote’s canvas shapes are derived from quilting patterns; a magical convergence of static mathematical repetition and whimsical bodily movement.

While Kenote considers how quilting and fabric patterns might be generative formal devices for painting, Matt Logsdon’s work more directly turns to fabric as one of the primary materials for his constructed works. Utilizing humble, everyday materials that obliquely reference physical labor and movement, his abstract, shaped compositions draw on the vocabulary of geometric abstract painting, yet retain a physicality and depth more native to sculpture. Introducing recognizable three-dimensional objects like sports balls, Logsdon repurposes and reimagines fields of play through the materiality of form and space.

Grounded more in the two-dimensional illusionary world, Maria Stabio’s brightly colored canvases marry techniques of painting, print-making, and cyanotype. Her luminous works embody multilayered narratives crafted out of recognizable shape and form that teeter on the symbolic, asking the viewer to float somewhere between a familiar and unfamiliar existence.

Though distinct in their approaches, the artists in the exhibition seem to be asking the same fundamental question about how material ingenuity in abstraction might be a means through which to explore personal histories and experiences, while also probing at something more universal about the human condition.