Fourteen painters, printmakers, and weavers were asked a single question this spring: what happens to a piece after you have decided it is finished, and then discover, late at night, that it is not?
The answers that came back, in studio visits and in late emails and in one case in a note folded into a stretched canvas, formed the shape of this exhibition. The works in this room were not made cleanly. They were unmade and remade, often many times, and in several cases were being remade as recently as the week before install.
What unites the work is not a medium or a school but a way of not letting go. The weavers here do not weave once; they weave, unpick, and weave again. The painters layer over what is already layered. The printmakers fold the misprints back into the edition. This is not a show about process in the abstract — it is a show about the specific, physical, often exhausting habit of continuing to work on a thing after the reasonable moment to stop.
The hand that shakes the canvas is not the hand of the hesitant maker. It is the hand that has lived with the work long enough to know where it has gone wrong.
I have tried, in arranging the room, to let you see the works next to each other the way the artists saw them in their own studios — close together, at varying heights, without the usual gallery-spacing that asks each piece to be considered alone.
One last thing. The artist prices on the sheets at the front of the room are the prices the artists set themselves. The house takes its share after — never from the artist’s number. We have, as is our practice, paid each artist in full before the opening.
Come early if you can. The light is best in the room before noon.