The Mountain Within by Johnny Taylor
Time Batteries by Elizabeth Barnes

March 20th to April 24th, 2026

Main and Lower Level Gallery Halls

L1 - The Mountain Within by Johnny Taylor
The Mountain Within marks a new direction in Taylor's ongoing exploration of landscape. Immersion in the world of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints with their muted palettes, segmented compositions, sharp angles, and flowing contours prompted a shift toward simplified and more deliberately structured forms. Placing one shape beside another introduced new clarity to the shifting terrain of the paintings.

In these landscapes, abstracted elements of nature and figure subtly converge. Structures or presences appear as embedded in the cadence of the arrangement where instinctive gesture has created both a nuanced imprint and a concrete form. Paint itself has moved into the role of subject. Applied in sculpted impasto masses, each mark exists as a distinct physical entity. Surfaces are built as much as painted, pushing into the viewing space. What might first appear maximal is in fact a search for reduction — a pursuit of essential form through material directness.

These works acknowledge the transitory nature of the places we inhabit; uncertain terrain shaped by upheaval, adaptation, and persistence. Gradually the mountain reveals itself as an internal and external force: a formation of ascent, pressure, and passage. Here, landscape becomes a reclaimed ground in the shifting worlds that we walk upon, and that live within.

L0 - Time Batteries by Elizabeth Barnes
“Each and every painting is a time battery – its apperception could consume a lifetime.”
-David Joselit

I love this quote. It suggests that each painting can embody its own history of production and its place in time, while simultaneously connecting to a much larger network spanning deep time and history. The quote uses the term apperception to imply an embodied idea connected intuitively to a larger body of ideas. This perfectly describes Barnes' process as she embarks upon each new painting. Barnes identifies as a flâneuse. This takes the 19th century term flâneur, originally used to describe a man of leisure strolling the streets of Paris, and updates it to define a contemporary feminized identity. Walking and sensing the environment is field study for her studio work. Sensations, and the experience of space and time, reveal patterns and  interconnections that can define place, time, future speculation, or buried histories.

The paintings are slow paintings, often based on a modernist-inspired grid. The work takes time to make. They set a stage where time can unfold for the viewer. Color integrates with overlapping forms across a rhythmic composition, resulting in
a sometimes fractured, but often harmonious environment. Through a process of layering, inspired as much by digital production as the intuitive and experimental application of paint, the paintings evolve. Forms overlap, appear, disappear, transform, vibrate, or sit in stillness, but nothing remains fixed.

All is in flux.