Aglaé Bassens’ (b. 1986, Belgium; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) paintings retain the quality of a snapshot of objects that are crumpled, discarded, or on the brink of collapse: a broken, half-opened umbrella; a dropped cigarette still glowing; languishing roses drooped over in their vase. This past year while being separated from many sources of her inspiration, Bassens mined images from a newly transformed locale, the overlooked became both entrancing and precious. Motifs in her work reflect Bassens’ own personal memories, experiences, and feelings. Reflecting life’s constant shift of time, love, and loss, her paintings memorialize what’s been left behind while also anticipating the new.

Amanda Baldwin's (b. 1984, Seattle WA; lives and works in Queens, NY) landscapes represent an idealized world that can never be visited. She finds commonalities between micro and macro in the rhythms and growth patterns of nature. Her paintings seek a geometric order and reason: raindrops are spheres, mountains are triangles, melon seeds are perfect teardrop voids. She carefully renders each component discrete and knowable and yet distinctly uncanny, all washed in myriad tones of meditative and calming. As she explores mathematical patterns and underpinnings to natural phenomena, Baldwin creates her own systems of growth, reducing unwieldy nature into recurring motifs. Each element toggles back and forth between representation and patterned abstraction: palm tree’s woven bark pattern morphs into a Brancusi-esque tower; a sliver of a shimmering lake through a valley becomes a harmonious inverted pyramid; bushes and tree tops are distilled into orbs floating like atoms; blocky zig-zags stand in for distant receding mountains.