Vernal

Vernal explores how artists return to the natural world as a site where memory, meaning, and material change converge.

Featuring work by Rebecca Allan, Hon Eui Chen, Grace DeGennaro, Christy Gast, Grace Hager, Stephen Hendee, Emily Pettigrew, Halsey Rodman, Molly Smith, rocki swiderski, and Hai Zhang, the exhibition asks us to reconsider the landscape in this moment of climate disruption, where reverence and reckoning coexist.

Every March, when the sun aligns directly above the equator, the vernal equinox marks a moment of near-perfect balance between day and night. From the Latin ver, meaning spring, vernal signals the beginning of the season in the Northern Hemisphere: a collective emergence from darkness, a point of equilibrium and transition, and a recalibration of light, time, and perception.

Moving across registers—from elemental abstraction to repositories for awe to quiet warnings—these artists navigate our increasingly fraught relationship with the landscape. Some works emerge from direct, personal encounters with the natural world; others construct imagined or remembered landscapes shaped by longing and loss. Several artists seduce us with wild beauty, while others ask us to linger in shadow or discomfort. Across the exhibition, time expands from the deeply personal to the geologic and cosmic, encouraging viewers to slow down, look more closely, and consider their place within an unstable and evolving world.

Rebecca Allan's paintings are informed by her practice as a horticulturalist, garden designer, and conservationist. Her work highlights how we simultaneously tend, tame, encroach upon, and honor the natural world. Holding a tension between observational representation and the utopia of abstraction, Allan’s paintings breathe the particulars of place: mountains, rivers and streams; vernal pools in rock quarries; plant nurseries; and gardens steeped in history.

Hon Eui Chen was born in a refugee camp on the Cambodia-Thailand border and raised in Mississippi. Stitching her painted surfaces with silk and wool, Chen creates imagined landscapes that exist between memory and dream, infused with a quiet melancholy and a sense of diasporic longing–a yearning for home that exists across past and future, presence and absence.

Grace DeGenarro's paintings pulse with subtle optical vibration and luminous restraint. Her work examining Plato's five solids—geometric forms associated with air, water, fire, earth, and the cosmos—offers a meditation on the unseen structures that shape the universe. DeGennaro's process unfolds in three stages: a glowing transparent color and cold wax ground, a central geometric form, and a delicate lattice of hand-painted dots. Part of her ongoing investigation of "sacred geometry" across cultures and time, the Platonic solids have long been thought to reveal divine or universal ordering principles.

Christy Gast's Bog Skirt honors the bog as material archive. The work recreates a double-scale version of the Bronze Age Egtved Girl's string skirt, whose twist structure dates back to the ceremonial solar-cycle textiles depicted in Paleolithic stone Venus sculptures. Constructed from strips of discarded knitwear destined for landfill and soaked in a walnut tannin bath, the work connects the preservative chemistry of bog sites and the Egtved Girl's oak coffin to the extended afterlife of contemporary fast fashion.

Grace Hager's work draws on personal encounters with nature, reclaiming bold psychedelic color to evoke awe, transformation, and the ungraspable. Hager’s Mirage print depicts a fleeting encounter with a wolf. Rendered in a vibrant, high-key palette, the work hovers between the real and the imagined, conjuring a heightened emotional state.

Stephen Hendee’s invented topologies warn of human intervention in the natural world. His New Hydra print offers a futuristic vision of industrialization’s imprint on port cities as sea levels rise. His Black Drawing series revisits the vector-based vernacular of his large-scale installations and his enduring investigation of the dark interplay between technology and humanity.

Emily Pettigrew draws on history, folk mythology, and observation to present scenes where layers of past and present time co-exist. Recalling references to both the land and architecture from her Maine childhood and her current home in New York’s Catskill Mountains, she creates liminal places suspended in time.

Halsey Rodman's practice asks us to consider time in relation to everything from plants to planets, collapsing vast temporal scales into intimate, direct observation and simultaneous perspective. His sculpture The Wind at Night (B) draws on his decades-long work at High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California, where the desert’s apparent stillness disguises the continuous, natural and human-made microevolutions of the landscape. Mastic Tree from Five Angles depicts the shadows of a tree encountered at a residency in France.

Molly Smith has been exploring the landscape for decades through material and observational processes drawn from her surroundings. Created over the course of her pregnancy while living in a cabin she built with her partner, her large-scale work on paper uses ink made from oak tree galls. Her smaller watercolors and drawings are portals into the rhythms of her rural farmlife in Massachusetts.

rocki swiderski's work investigates the American Southwest as a site between the seen and the imagined, where water is precious, night offers refuge from the sun, and military installations encroach on the landscape. Their painting night mare (dream horse) depicts an equine figure at the edge of a bramble, functioning simultaneously as protector, sentinel, and mythic presence.

Hai Zhang emigrated to the US from China in the early 2000s, and his work as a photographer took him across the globe. During the pandemic he moved to a cottage in the Catskill Mountains with his family and now divides his time between New York City and the woods. His photo-sculptural works examine the history of the Catskill forests as a site of intervention–where land is cleared, trees are trained, and nature is shaped by human desire.

The vernal equinox promises equilibrium, but these artists refuse an easy balance. The landscapes here—whether remembered, imagined, or observed—hold space for contradiction and insist we pay closer attention to what is already disappearing.