IT’S MORE THE WAY IT IS NOW THAN IT’S EVER BEEN Featuring works by: Austin Li Chang, David Fix Jr., Erica Newton Co-organized by Hannah Studnick (Ruby/Dakota) and Tamara Pasternak July 10 - July 29, 2026 Opening reception: Friday, July 10, 6-9 PM

We enter the room Stage Left, like a play within a dream, where the spectators are every version of yourself, even the ones you have not yet lived. We cannot see their faces, just silhouettes in different shaped hats.

Hovering above it all is also You. You are the puppeteer, the marionette, and every character in this production. To borrow a phrase from artist Austin Li Chang, the eye of the storm is sap green.

Life unfolds, like a sweeping narrative, an exquisite corpse, a story that began long before you got here, and one that continues to build on itself, and its own self-important purpose. The story of You, and then Us.

On the walls of this Room, there are images, made by the people in this play.

Three separate versions of the self in the form of three different artists; Austin Li Chang, David Fix Jr., and Erica Newton. A type of Plato’s cave, they are paintings, yes, but in other ways they are projections of the past and future, shadows, dancing light, and the unbearable present. An otherworldly plane to get lost in, an epic to tell.

Although these paintings appear at first glance as undisturbed, languid scenes of everyday life, they draw the contours of something deeper, more ubiquitous. In these seemingly muted worlds, where the intimate and the universal converge, the nostalgic textures imbue the work with the strangeness of an alternate reality, one simultaneously existing with the now.

Through the ostensible stillness and guilelessness of their lifescapes, carved and built textures and portraiture, these artists achieve what only a few can: they create a tension that engages the viewer in the dangerous and necessary feeling of desire created by a fragile equilibrium of absence and presence.

Each painting alludes to what is not there, to what lies outside of the canvas, or the obscured face, the viewer builds their own narrative, and inevitably draws from their own intimate experiences to fill the gaps. It forces us to delve into a more personal recollection of memories that make us reflect on who we are, as individuals and in tandem with the rest of humanity.

For example, in a series where he paints his late grandfather from photographs taken on a trip through Europe, Austin Li Chang invites us to discover an intimate portrait of the man, and although his figure seems more nebulous in the smaller paintings, his presence is strikingly magnetic. This touching portrayal reaches its final articulation through a bolder, more cutting portrayal of an old man, as one of the artist’s final visions of his grandfather.

Erica Newton’s work touches on similar themes of longing and nostalgia and a connection to self through presence. In her signature medium of oil on plaster, she creates works with both weight and weightlessness, grit and textural depth, as well as the smoothness of water running over a rock.

David Fix Jr., a painter and self-identified outsider artist living and working on his family’s ancestral fruit farm in Upstate New York, is also using his grandfather’s old photographs as source material, but rather than trying to fully articulate these figures, he removes their faces, reducing them to texture and color, via a technique all his own, working in epoxy clay applied like a pinch-pot to wood panel.

The candidness of these works is far from naïve. Instead, it reveals a rare honesty and a remarkable sensitivity to the nostalgia and beauty woven into experience and memory. Their poignancy stems from their evocation of what lies at the heart of the human experience: the transient beauty of the present moment. The ability to begin anew at every second, and continue to write your own story. This is Act 1, Scene 1. Now, as always, is the beginning of the rest of your life.