In this two-person exhibition featuring new work by Hallie McNeill and Natalie Westbrook, the gallery becomes a stage for insatiable desires. The theatrical juxtaposition of McNeill’s sculptural work and Westbrook’s paintings on paper evokes ideas of consumption, desire and possession played out in a somber grisaille palette.

Upon entering the space, the viewer is encircled by the looking eyes of Westbrook’s paintings, returning an outward gaze. Through the opposing forces of trompe l’oeil representation and gestural graffiti-like abstraction, the figures appear physically embedded within their own image. Unlike the tradition of the canvas as a pictorial window or physical surface for material application, the paper acts as a somatic and psychological trap for the represented figure. Bodies appear sandwiched within the paper and paint itself, caught like flies in a spider web, possessed by their own making. The artist asks, “What does it mean to be trapped within a painting?”

McNeill’s sculptural work reflects a landscape of shifting dynamics of ownership and accomplishment: goals as traps, hopscotch-esque or chess-like grids to navigate, and emotive depictions of possessive pronouns. The palette of brass, silver, and gray speak to coinage, hardware, and architecture while the hand-built ceramic, cement surfaces, and netting reflect the tedium of craft and labor. The works question how we continually negotiate and renegotiate what we aspire and lay claim to – and the resultant emotions – on an interpersonal level as part of our exhaustive and never-ending, internalized to-do lists.