Often I am Permitted to return to a meadow
Opening FriDAY
November 7, 2025
The Active Space
566 Johnson Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Curated by Patrick Bower & Robert Zurer
Judy Glantzman, Brown Head, 2025, Oil on canvas, 36 x 48.
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow, a poem by Robert Duncan, explores the mystery of creativity—an “eternal pasture folded in all thought” that feels both intimate and beyond comprehension. Duncan describes it as a place “made up by the mind / that is not mine, but a made place / that is mine.”
The artists in this exhibition inhabit that same tension: creativity as an interior landscape that reflects the self, yet remains strange and inexhaustible. It is a wellspring they return to repeatedly, too expansive ever to be contained.
In their searching lines, erasures, repetitions, we see intricately imagined worlds and figures that seem to form and undo themselves before our eyes. They embrace the weird, the provisional and the uncertain with humor, wonder and curiosity.
The Artists
Judy Glantzman’s scrubbed-out and redrawn figures invite us to watch how she learns, not learn what she knows. Faces begat faces and limbs begat limbs. Notions overflow into the next canvas, connecting each work to the last in an unbroken inquiry into what the hell is going on.
In Karin Campbell we witness bodies that embody the viscera of thinking. Collage, paint and half-erased line work lead us through the jarring and warring layers of being that ordinarily hide (imperfectly) from view.
Ruby Hewitt knows something is very wrong. So she dismantles some of the windowdressing of human consciousness, laying bare the cute, the grotesque and the uncanny with figures and objects that expand and contract like the reservoir bag of an airplane emergency oxygen mask. Remember: You have to save yourself before you save others.
Carlisle Burch’s smudged-on figures capture the lustiness of looking. The line work is delicious but ravaged, with both living and dead subjects squirming uncomfortably beneath the oily film of her searching brushwork and studied juxtapositions.
Amy Morken clusters her mostly-female figures like shades waiting for Charon to ferry them into the underworld. They can dig in their stiletto’ed feet all they want: Morken pitilessly pulls back flesh to reveal the ghoulish fabulousness of life and the hollow postures of mortality.
Matt Richards weaves cosmological, synaptic narratives around the character John Fiddle, a hesher shaman who conjures a junk-yard eden wherever his feet touch. Matt’s architectures of the mind overwhelm with alien foliage, baroque flourishes and a kind of multidimensional storytelling that screams soundlessly into the void.
Amy Chasse is an evil dollmaker bent on dispatching her animated effigies into the world to hug and kiss the population into submission. Her apple-cheeked figures feel like deflating balloons that waver uneasily over the landscape while slowly leaking an unspeakable secret. Eavesdrop at your own risk!
Lauren Tsipori paints like a woodland creature, blissfully unaware of the physical and spiritual barriers between beings. But their badger’s-eye view has a lot to reveal: The world is a heatmap of desire too powerful to overcome. We must eat (and kill). We must love. Everything that happens will happen today.
Amy Talluto’s atavistic figures hover like revenant icons adrift in a fleshy netherworld. But there are signposts along the way, in case we care to join. Watch out for murky doorways, runic symbols and cotton candy contrails that all seem to point ever deeper into the twilight.
EXHIBITION DEtAILS
The Active Space
566 Johnson Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
Opening: November 7th, 6-8pm
Gallery Hours to be announced.