Exploring the Depths of Abstractionism considers abstract art as a catalyst for self-reflection, a conduit through which ideas, emotional states, and embodied experiences can be communicated beyond the confines of traditional representation.

These paintings induce a calm insightfulness, they remind of meditation, of closing one’s own eyes and trying to escape thinking, to be focused and present, yet avoiding any thoughts. Featherlight might then be no longer only an adjective describing these artworks, but the feeling one would feel by giving time o them. It would be describing the colour shapes one might visualise trying to empty their minds, subduing their emotions and allowing these ecstatic melodies, these calm sound-haikus Vinna Begin methodically paints on canvas to take space and time, in their lento, ad libitum.

Kiacz’s work is informed by the natural world. The artist is particularly drawn to fleeting, atmospheric light phenomena such as sunsets and rainbows, which she actively documents for reference on her phone when such encounters happen. In fact, Kiacz’s interest in working on shaped supports arose from an earlier landscape painting practice; many of her panel forms refer directly to the shapes of clovers and flowers.

Theatre of Experience, a display of nine framed works at House of Seiko, focuses on Madam X's mandala drawings developed over the last fifteen years. Many of these paintings and drawings posit themselves as evolving works. They are records of the experience of her spiritual insights and were created solely for her pursuit of spiritual understanding. They contain intricately layered yet familiar images of humans, creatures, and other living things weaving through the sphere of time, attempting to return to the center of the world in which they have been born.

Torn by hand, dyed in vats, pressed with ink or found objects, Humphreys performs a number of processes on paper. She activates its permeable surface, testing the paper’s resilience with line, color and pressure– motivated by the transformative possibilities of printmaking more so than by its staid tradition of serial image making.

Metallurgy, the study of the properties of metal and its mixtures, began as part of the ancient practice of alchemy.  Alchemists would subject metals to high heat in order to shape and reformulate new metallic forms, with records kept so that future alchemists could interpret their implications.  

On the one hand, the images have an obvious cosmic, visionary, and even psychedelic potency. They seem almost like illustrations of visionary archetypes, as the faithful transcription of cosmic or ritual truths. But at the same time, they are very deliberately reflexive and phenomenologically adaptive paintings. Smith constructs them to cunningly include the viewer and the viewer’s process of perception. The paintings attempt to make the process of becoming concrete. In this way they are as much like Cézanne, Agnes Martin or Bridget Riley as they are like surrealist or symbolist art. The viewer’s flowing process of perception interacts with the images to create what Smith calls a “third space.”

Over the course of nearly four decades and across three continents, Abidjan-born, New York–based artist Ouattara Watts has developed a painting practice that places cosmograms, numerals, cloth, and other symbols and relics from around the world into relation with each other, leveling hierarchies and creating new relations in the process.

Rituals features a series of paintings that explore the sublime beauty of mountainscapes and the color spectrum. These carefully crafted compositions are not mere representations; they imagine elevated terrains inspired by the artist’s deep connection to nature and her personal and artistic rituals. Developed through repetitive actions and processes, each painting emerges as if from a meditative journey, manifested through Guidi’s investigations of color, form, texture, and material.

The Philosophical Research Society proudly presents "The Museum of Multidimensional Mutant Maps," a solo exhibition featuring bold new works by interdisciplinary artist Edgar Fabián Frías. On view January 13 through February 24, 2024, this exhibition transforms the gallery into an immersive museum experience reexamining maps through the lens of imagination, reflection, and reinvention.

Inspired by the Nierika, a Wixárika technology, Frías has created interactive installations, paintings, sculptures, prints, and videos to help guide, confuse, and connect with visitors to this museum. These new artworks are arranged throughout thematic wings of the museum, each exploring different facets of maps. 

By interweaving indigenous, psychedelic, punk, and futurist influences, Frías has constructed a museum at once critical, visionary and whimsical. Their mutant maps capture traces of haunted pasts, possible presents and emergent futures - if we dare to reorient our perspectives. Ultimately, this exhibition serves as a testament to the transformative power of indigenous technologies and art practices to prompt reflection, spark imagination and manifest reinvention.  

In an age of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, an essential calling of art is to explore the fundamentals of being human and reunite people with the earthly, animal, corporeal realities that AIs don’t have. Hollowell is a leader in this domain, not because she is strategic or opportunistic, but because she feels the mission in her bones.

“In Spiritual Light” is an exhibition about the core of creation and the energy and inherent drive that compel an artist to create. Developmentally, all human beings begin the same chronological, rudimentary journey to image making first the scribble, then, the figure and eventually the symbology of person, place and thing. At this juncture, children begin to follow their own individual path of interest. Ultimately, some will continue to focus on art- drawing, painting, building and becoming lost in the realm of magic and the transformation of the sacred to the profane. Imbuing a sheet of paper into a world of their own making. Falling deeper and deeper into the canyon of their imagination. Perhaps losing touch with the reality around them finding solace and empowerment in the compartmentalization of ideas.

Whether inspired by optical or nature-based phenomena, or their own personal sense of interiority, these artists use color, light, form, space, and poetic gesture as a means of exploring worlds within and outside of our corporeal existence. Several through lines emerge—among them: a systematic process of removal or negation, whether of color or of material; a fascination with light and the ever-changing qualities of the atmosphere, and subtle shifts in color gradation that elicit an emotional response from the viewer.

Over the past decade she has developed an important body of work, delineated by series: Creation Myth, Steppe and Tengri. Each representing a metaphorical chapter in her evolution as an artist and thinker, Gali adapts both technique and materials according to an essential, abstracted schematic. Luminous and beguiling, her works explore the mysterious forces - ancient wisdom, nature’s cycles and cosmic order - that shape our lives.

Halloran engenders an intimate and empathetic approach to storytelling through the figurative portrayal of her wife, Felicia, who is depicted throughout the epic narrative in the heroic role of a space traveler, braving through the probabilities of wormholes and perils of black holes. Throughout the sequence of paintings, Felicia’s humanity bridges distant concepts closer to home, a parallel to Thorne’s poetic verse. In this respect, the project presents an intimate experience of our universe’s knowns and unknowns.

The exhibition includes sixteen new works made with oil sticks, in a range of colors and textures.  The paintings expand upon the artist's iconic language of landscape imagery depicted through bold, geometric forms.  Always exploring new approaches to applying oil stick to paper, within this exhibition Zheng has also increased the scale of her works, with the addition of larger paintings in rectangular and elongated formats.

Forty major areas, gardens, bridges, landforms, sculpture, terraces, fences and architectural works. Covering thirty acres, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation uses nature to celebrate nature, both intellectually and through the senses, including the sense of humour.

A water cascade of steps recounts the story of the universe; a terrace shows the distortion of space and time caused by a black hole; a “Quark Walk” takes the visitor on a journey to the smallest building blocks of matter and a series of landforms and lakes recall fractal geometry.

The Artists will perform a series of new site-specific movements through the hallowed halls of the Hammond’s House Museum. The deep and rich history of the space will lend its legacy as an institution to intimate moments, projection, and a live performance, which will engage the audience in acts of transparency and acceptance, all set to songs that have helped Umoja and Roni fall and stay in love.

As art historian Alison Syme has shown, the “hermaphroditic” subjectivity of flora offered artists at the turn of the twentieth century such as John Singer Sargent a way to queer the poetics of painting (Sargent himself likened the act of painting to hand-pollination). Rogers pushes this secret history into the present and out in the open. Like the kind of intergenerational queer friendships he often cites as his inspiration, Rogers’ pictures offer a reparative vision of queer joy that is—and this might be the most shocking thing of all about them—not timeless but historical.

Jennifer Guidi’s layered painting practice investigates and generates meditative states of being—spaces in which spiritual, natural, and ethereal boundaries cease to exist. Guidi (b. 1972, Redondo Beach, CA) produces abstract, colorful compositions that build on ancient theories of energy and perception to transport us into heightened states of being.

While the twelve oil paintings on view can be loosely considered landscapes, there are arboreal referents, hues evocative of earth and sky, an elemental atmosphere, there are no horizon lines, and no concrete indications of place. Instead, shapes unmoored from definition transfigure across the canvas, colors mix and merge in sweeping gestures, dappled patterns, patches of texture, and translucent washes. Poised between abstraction and impressionism, they subvert familiar hierarchies privileging intuition over analysis, the metaphorical over the literal, and the elusive to the definitive.

Inspired by nature, music, and mysticism, Zoe McGuire creates surreal landscapes that hum with vibrant colors and nuanced tonal scales.

In Light the Dark, Hughes looks to the coupling and uncoupling of day and night, of eros and pathos, and of joy and its brooding contrasts, as overarching metaphors for what it is like to feel, see, love, and live. Connections between the galleries abound, both in terms of subject matter and visual atmosphere, so that light and dark function not so much as concepts or categories, but modes of inquiry engaged in urgent conversation. As a result, the paintings—and the show as a whole—feature both celebratory harmonies and heated conflicts.

The title of the project, Where Memories of Travels Go, describes Zheng’s aim to be transported through a creative process in her pursuit of loftier dimensions. Her solitary journeying was initially a way to create refuge out of an oppressive childhood in China but evolved into a means to evade the entrapments of our impersonal digital world. Zheng takes inspiration from the varied and expansive landscapes she visits during the numerous artist residencies she has attended throughout the United States, Europe, and China over the last decade. She also cites artists that orbit many centuries and geographies who too made work that merge their experiences of the natural world with a special blend of personalized spiritualism.

This series of works is the latest development of an ongoing narrative in which Merchant draws on her imagination and the ancient knowledge of nature to consider how humanity might leave behind traditional ways of existing to evolve across different spaces, times, and dimensions. Her creatures, in their various guises, can be seen as proxies for us, caught in various stages of becoming. In Cosmic Crucible, for example, the recurring figure with the head of a vulture – a representation of humanity in its current state – is pictured passing through a portal that seems to separate the polluted past and a more fertile future.