May 29 - June 24, 2025

Alchemists: Linda Casbon, Laurel Marx, Ted Thirlby, and Grace Bakst Wapner

Small Worlds: Karin Bruckner and Kate Missett

On The Wall: Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle: Sue Koch

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 29, 6 - 8pm

Alchemists

Alchemists brings together four artists, Linda Casbon, Laurel Marx, Ted Thirlby, and Grace Bakst Wapner, who each work in different mediums but share a distinct ability to transform the humble and everyday into something quietly powerful and ethereal. Though their practices are widely varied, each artist channels a personal, spiritual alchemy, transforming raw materials into works that are refined, contemplative, and visually arresting. Geometry, whether literal or implied, runs through the show as a connective thread, grounding the ephemeral in structure and anchoring each artist's poetic sensibility. 

Linda Casbon’s ceramic sculptures approach language through form, gesture, and spatial rhythm. Her works, which range from individual objects to larger groupings, operate like visual poems: metaphoric, unnameable, yet deeply familiar. Casbon explores the threshold between two and three dimensions, grounding her work in the body while reaching toward the intangible. Her pieces are vessels of presence and perception, where painted illusion and sculptural form converge in a quietly profound conversation.

Laurel Marx’s photographic works are meditations on light, balance, and reduction. Through the elimination of extraneous detail, Marx creates images that reveal a larger mystery. Lines in her compositions serve as visual thresholds, offering a quiet but decisive invitation into deeper narrative space. Her practice is rooted in attentiveness, a reverence for the way light can briefly and beautifully transform the world around us.

Ted Thirlby’s mixed media works on found plywood are acts of rescue, reflection, and reverence. Working with discarded, weathered materials, Thirlby embraces the histories embedded in their surfaces, their cracks, chips, and imperfections, and responds with gestures that seek redemption. His work questions the nature of authorship, exploring the exploring materiality and the evolving relationship between human intention and elemental force.

Grace Bakst Wapner works with fabric and handmade paper to explore abstract ideas through color, texture, and form. Her process is fluid and dialogic, allowing the material to shape meaning as much as the other way around. Themes such as inheritance, transformation, and perception surface subtly through each piece, which feels both deliberate and intuitively assembled. Her works are soft yet strong, intimate yet expansive, each one its own language.

In Alchemists, each artist acts as a kind of transmuter, guiding raw substance into elevated expression. The result is a show that feels at once grounded and otherworldly, tactile and transcendent.

Small Worlds

In Small Worlds, Karin Bruckner presents a continuous installation of 3 x 3-inch hand-pulled prints, each a unique window into a tiny universe, meticulously floated on 10 x 8-inch BFK Rives paper. This format elevates each piece, allowing for both visual intimacy and the opportunity for exploration. The works are created using a range of traditional and experimental techniques, including Chine Collé, embossing, drypoint, and mixed media. Part of Bruckner’s “125 for 125” project, the small scale offers a creative laboratory for the artist; for the viewer, a chance to collect accessible, original art. Half of the works are displayed on the gallery walls, with the remainder available in an art case. Bruckner states, “I have always been a strong believer in good things coming in small packages and of art being accessible to anyone who loves it. It’s the little things and a small world, after all.”

Kate Missett’s ceramic work in Small Worlds draws inspiration from ancient vessel forms, including Egyptian canopic jars, Native American coil pots, African terra cotta sculpture, incorporating the richly patterned surfaces of Renaissance majolica. Her subject matter has always focused on her environment; based in Brooklyn, her practice engages with social, ecological, and political themes, often sparked by photographs she takes in the city and while traveling. Missett employs a range of techniques, including raku, salt, wood firing, lusters, silkscreen, and photo transfer, to craft narrative surfaces that reflect her observations. She states, “As an artist I have frequently responded to the challenges of our times; both political and environmental.” While her work often carries a sense of whimsy, it is deeply rooted in the belief that artists have a responsibility to bear witness and respond to the world around them.

Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle

In her installation for On the Wall, artist Sue Koch reflects on life beneath the surface in the work Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle that spans over twelve feet. In this expansive mixed media piece, which incorporates acrylic, jute, mono print, and mock silkscreen on linen, Koch depicts the sea with cephalopods, coral, jellyfish, sea anemone, urchin, and turtles through her own lexicon of abstraction. Her work is influenced by Japanese Rinpa painting particularly, Shibata Zeshin’s Autumn Grasses in Moonlight. “The Rinpa aesthetic embraces bold, exaggerated, or purely graphic renderings of natural motifs... Underlying Rinpa design sensibilities is a tendency toward simplification and abbreviation, often achieved through a process of formal exaggeration.” (John Carpenter, Designing Nature, The Rinpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012.) Koch began working on Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle in 2019 and resumed working on the piece in 2024, stating, “I didn’t feel it was finished, and perhaps, it’s still in progress, but here is where I am now.”

Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle is on view until July 30, 2025.