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Using the metaphor of a body as a container, Theresa Daddezio explores notions of consciousness, fragility, and sexuality within a language of painting and its history of abstraction. Through an embodied concept of time and place, she creates optical undulations of flatness, depth, vibrancy, and subtlety. The paintings share a compressed visual environment where shapes take near identifiable forms in a fleeting taxonomy of spatial and textural obfuscation that transforms marks into resemblances of flora, vessels, and earthen strata. These forms, evoking interior physiological spaces, areas of texture, and flattened color, heighten a disassociation of visual sensation. Commingling earthen tones contrast with synthetic palettes complicate a natural and artificial physicality. Focusing on these spatial and chromatic negations, Daddezio constructs an emergent and psychological site - manifestations of sensual experience - where the tangibility of the present entangles layers of memory.

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Aho sees this series of paintings as remembered glimpses of the landscape passed on a walk through the woods in search of something, toward some unknown destination.

He writes, “Sometimes I felt alone in the woods at the river’s edge, at other times I was in the company of Walt Whitman, Constance Gordon Cumming, or John McPhee. It was the image of the Kingfisher, following northern streams and rivers as described by 19th-century naturalist John Burroughs that planted the idea of an intentional seeking-searching-roaming in the paintings.”

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One of the previous works, Rosewater and Brimstone, combines a collection of recurring forms, from the arch to the cartoonish clouds to the strange “figure” inspired by an alembic, a long-necked alchemical vessel used to distill liquids into vapors. Passages of patterning operate as a kind of domestic foil for the explosion of deep red paint, glitter, and ghostly matter.

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“The dense, tangled, and undulating forms of spaces and plants in my recent body of work address some of these complicated new environments we are creating, full of both worry and hope...The subject of wildflowers, one of the first plants to return after a forest fire, feels urgent. Although they are intentionally very romantic, they are also simple, straightforward, and focused. They are concise and analytic, representing a single piece of ground. As is the case in much of my work, they ride a line between abstraction and representation, coming together as an image while falling apart at the same time.”

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Each moment with Takenaga’s paintings will shape and re-shape the forms into something else, creating new beginnings with each glance. Starting with fluid pours of paint onto the canvas, Takenaga then creates undulating shapes with brushstrokes resembling dots, splashes, and sparks coming together and receding in outwardly infinite space. They can be understood as kaleidoscopic layers of outlines, horizons, and atmospheres, that coalesce as much as they diverge. As the artist explains, "I really wanted them to move more into abstraction, into more ambiguous space so they could be aerial views, or microscopic views, or traditional horizontal landscape."