Strawberry Moon

Named by Algonquian tribes of the northeastern United States, who used lunar phases to track agricultural cycles, the Strawberry Moon signals summer's wild strawberry harvest. The first full moon of June, the Strawberry Moon appears larger as it rises on the horizon, an effect of perception shaped by position.

In this spirit of ripe potential, Strawberry Moon presents work by Christy Gast, Fabienne Lasserre, Halsey Rodman, and Molly Smith. Staged in a former dairy factory, the work ranges from large-scale sculptural installation to intimate watercolor paintings, exploring bodies, landscape, desire, and the scales of time.

More than a decade ago, Molly Smith left the New York art world to homestead in the hills of western Massachusetts, building a life shaped by close attention to the surrounding landscape. Her watercolor paintings gather fleeting moments of light, atmosphere, and season into compositions suspended between stillness and transformation. Rooted in rural rhythms and seasonal cycles, Smith's new body of work shifts between painting en plein air and working in the studio from photographs or memory.

Smith’s paintings begin with seasonal observation: the wooded valley she calls home, moon phases, winter light, a burn pile, the first signs of spring emerging through the trees. She is drawn to small details and quiet transitions: dawn rising over ridge line, a twisting branch against the sky, dusk settling over a pond, a great moon rising. Taken together, the works form an elegy for the natural world, and a record of one artist's sustained attention to it.

View all works by Molly Smith

Halsey Rodman's sculpture and works on paper explore overlapping scales of time, from the cosmic to the infinitesimal. For Strawberry Moon, Rodman presents two pieces from his Wind at Night series that followed his installation at High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California, where the desert's apparent stillness disguises the continuous microevolutions of the landscape. The Wind at Night (B) hangs from the ceiling with twine, a bed of bricks holding a moon, another timekeeper of the night.

The metronome has featured in Rodman's work for decades after he was first captivated by the rendering of one in a Matisse painting. Rodman has cast metronomes in iron, sculpted them in clay, and they appear in his drawings and paintings. The Metronomes "engage both the time between moments and the accumulations of moments that compose deep time." In the three drawings of The Wind at Night (C), shadows cast sequentially by a wilting cutting of a mugwort plant are traced left to right in graphite within the sweeping spaces of metronome forms. Mugwort is an invasive herb with medicinal qualities that has escaped cultivation to overpower meadows and roadsides throughout the Northeast. Evoking the power and indifference of plants to human consideration, it carries both healing and destroying potential.

In Rodman's The List, bronze-cast commas create a sentence or sequence of objects with works from his ongoing Metronomes and Listening Objects series, which are "open circuits" modeled after ears. "The commas are both conjunctions and the means to construct an open set, one that is reconfigurable and inherently unfinished," Rodman explains. Exploring the comma for the first time, The List operates not as a fixed statement, but as an open form for Rodman's ongoing investigation of time and accumulation.

View all works by Halsey Rodman

Fabienne Lasserre has spent decades working in the space between sculpture and painting. Her "3D paintings" and "2D sculptures" invent bodies through tactile form, inviting viewers to look through, walk around, and peer over them. "I choose my materials as counterpoint, contrast or complement to the other materials," Lasserre explains, "I’m always looking for ways to combine glossy, gritty, crunchy, shiny, juicy." For Strawberry Moon, Lasserre introduces ceramics as a new medium that grew out of her work with the West Village artist-run Ceramics Club. The new work dips between figuration and abstraction, its material friction inseparable from the contested definitions of gender and identity that run through Lasserre's practice.

Outside Day and Ocean Furious showcase Lasserre’s tactile materiality with hand-stitched canvases lined with papier-mâché fabric stretched around bent steel armature, while Eyes Still As a Pond introduces marbled ceramic canes alongside the canvases creating a material tension. For Night Moves, People Thing, and Echo, Lasserre cast ceramic pods and body parts (hands, arms, and limbs), to punctuate her abstract vocabulary. Now Nocturne and Vague Moment create windows or portals similar to her Listener 7 work.

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Christy Gast's sculptures explore unexpected relationships between bodies, materials, and the natural world. Her quartet of denim and quilt sculptures builds on her complex textile construction practice. In both Smile and its sister piece Four-Button Fly, möbius loops of entangled, disembodied denim limbs create seemingly improbable forms. Both are fashioned from hand-cut, dyed raw denim, but Four Button Fly adds a layer of direct printing of foraged botanicals to create a floral camouflage.

Angels & Asses creates a trio of entwined denim bodies wrapped in bandana cotton, using the iconography of queer hankie code culture. In Miracles No Miracles, a salvaged beaver dam stick, gnarled by nature's builders, props up a denim form with a flesh-toned inlay and mirrored surface that casts a mosaic of reflections on the wall. For Disco Boot, Gast repurposed her work boots that trudged nature's carbon sinks as part of her Ensayos eco-storytelling work. She covered them in mirrored tiles, "so they could continue making shimmer, reflecting light, landscape, and the bodies moving around them."

View all works by Christy Gast