“Temporal Shift” brings together five artists who explore varying ways of experiencing and envisioning passages of time  –from geological to physiological, biological, cultural, and metaphysical. The exhibition features works by Kelsey Miller, Amy Theiss Giese, Kim Carlino, Saberah Malik, and Lena Schmid, and is curated by Alicia Renadette.

On Sunday, December 10 from 1:00-2:00pm, there will be an informal introductory tour led by the artists, followed by a reception with light fare from 2:00-4:00pm.

Kelsey Miller (Portsmouth, RI), presents a site-specific graphite wall-drawing titled, “Of the Earth.” In this work, she establishes an immersive experience of place using abstracted landscape imagery that is familiar—but not specific in location. Drawing inspiration from graphite powder rubbings collected across diverse terrains—from Arctic glaciers to Rhode Island's glacial stones—she crafts a richly textured record of these landscapes. Her process of making rubbings that transfer the ancient surfaces of geological formations as ephemeral marks on paper substantiates her presence within the landscape, while offering moments of reflection on the past.

Amy Theiss Giese (Boston, MA) presents a selection of photographic images from her ongoing series, “My Head is Too Heavy” which translates the prolonged periods of time she has spent isolated at home, due to the recent development of a chronic illness, as abstract self-portraits. Giese uses her phone and LiDAR scanning apps to construct virtual 3-D models of her body inhabiting spaces within her home. She then rotates these scanned models, taking a virtual tour of the scene until she chooses a vantage point that best conveys a specific emotional aspect of her physical experience. Her final flattened images exploit and benefit from the inaccuracies inherent within the technology she uses. Its glitches and gaps serve to create pictures that are distorted and fragmented, as her inner experience can often seem. 

In her series, “Digital Malaise”, Kim Carlino (Easthampton, MA) reflects on the challenge to process our present moment within an incessant deluge of competing sensory information. She weaves together compositions that layer contending lines and patterns into dynamically flowing environments. Her vibrantly colored paintings overlap and enfold amorphic, liquid pours of paint washes with bold and rigid lines, referencing hard edges of screens and architecture, and motifs pulled from such sources as OpArt, quilting patterns, and digitized camouflage. Orchestrating a cacophony of design influences and techniques, Carlino creates allusions to depth and movement that are refreshingly rhythmic and pleasantly engaging.

Saberah Malik (Warwick, RI) makes hollow, translucent sculptures through a process of molding fabric around solid objects, which are ultimately removed, leaving behind ethereal replications. Originally conceived for the Synergy II Project, a collaboration between Art League Rhode Island and Massachusetts Institute of Technology/ Woods Hole Oceanic Institute, Saberah Malik’s pieces translate phytoplankton, microbial creatures which have inhabited the Earth for over a billion years and are beneficial in capturing carbon dioxide, into macroscopic, stylized iterations that have come to the surface. 

Using dye on silk, Lena Schmid (Rockland, ME) paints abstract images that appear to pull their viewer through an enigmatic void, at an unspecified speed, towards an unknown destination. The atmospheres she creates feel at once filled with psychedelic adventure and stormy trepidation, accessing some ineffable psychic space. The delicate materiality of the works allow for subtle changes in the room to ripple through the fabric, causing it to sway and pulse, and causing the viewer to become aware of the air currents on their own skin, and their own breath. Of this work, Schmid says they are “,not a metaphor or likeness, they are the thing itself: both temporal and other-worldly, offering an escape from, and an explanation for, the nature of time.”