Jill Carnes, Secrets In the Garden, Embroidery, 14 x14 (left) and Steve Prince, Guard My Heart, Linoleum Cut, 18” x 24”, 2024 (right)
The exhibition features works by Steve Prince, whose prints and drawings merge spirituality, narrative, and social history into visual meditations on community and hope. Prince’s work, rooted in the Black diasporic experience, transforms storytelling into acts of resilience and collective renewal. Garth Fry’s sculptural installations merge science, material experimentation, and elemental process, evoking transformation, fragility, and renewal.
Jill Carnes’s embroidery, punch-needle, prints, and drawings, created in her Athens, Georgia studio, blend myth, music, and intuition—translating inner landscapes into vivid, hand-wrought compositions that bridge sound, memory, and form. Lita Tirak’s infrared photographs of the Great Dismal Swamp extend this dialogue into the spectral, revealing hidden ecologies and submerged histories through her fusion of research and poetic image-making.
Ian Mcfarlane Jennifer Holding, 2016, 16"x 20" ( frame 19"x 26" ) ,Archival pigment inkjet print, Edition 3/20
Michael K.Paxton, Interpolate #11 96" x 72" 2021
Michael K. Paxton’s new large-scale painting continues his exploration of gesture and atmospheric color, while Ian McFarlane’s photographic portrait—from his You Don’t Know series, depicting a woman in a coat—offers a moment of introspection and stillness. Dana Jo Cooley’s spiritually infused works explore transformation and renewal through symbolic imagery and material presence, inviting reflection on cycles of faith, intuition, and inner change. Noreen Dean Dresser’s burned paper and mixed-media work, incorporating organic materials, postage stamps, and painterly passages, reflects on fragility and regeneration. William Ruller’s abstract landscapes, painted in Apt, France, probe the tension between surface and structure, merging memory and terrain. Luther Gerlach’s photographic prints, created with historic wet-plate processes, incorporate ash from California’s Thomas Fire directly into the developer, transforming elemental destruction into haunting permanence. Christi Harris’s painting, from her Unwritten Historyproject, depicts a woman from the 1930s with dignity and restraint—bridging time through the quiet power of recovered memory.
Olga Tobreluts’s works, rooted in the post-Soviet New Academy movement, examine myth and modernity through digital collage and classical form, connecting antiquity with contemporary identity. Ivan Plusch’s paintings, marked by layered translucence and psychological depth, translate the flux of memory and perception into luminous abstraction. Nicki Santiago’s figurative works, grounded in observation and empathy, reimagine domestic and personal spaces through a humanist lens. Rebecca Shkeyrov’s paintings and prints, drawn from an earlier series in her evolving practice, continue her exploration of structure, light, and gesture—linking the gallery’s past and present dialogues. George Papadakis’s paintings, infused with a sense of nostalgia and emotional recall, explore how memory shapes visual experience—capturing fleeting moments that hover between presence and disappearance.
Together, these artists embody Matney Gallery’s commitment to environment, craft, and observation. The Fall Salon invites viewers to reflect on transformation as both artistic and spiritual practice—an evolving meditation on continuity, empathy, and creative renewal.
