Melanie Authier Liminal Reveries

ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce _Liminal Reveries_, a solo exhibition of new works on paper from Melanie Authier, in Gallery Two. The exhibition opens Friday, June 12th and continues through Saturday, August 1st, 2026. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. With _Liminal Reveries_ Melanie Authier presents a series of abstract watercolor and ink paintings on paper, produced during her recent month-long artist residency at The Annandale, in Prince Edward Island, Canada. During her time there, Authier worked in situ, recording her surroundings and transmuting the East Coast landscape through her recognizable abstract visual language. Authier’s paintings address pictorial contradictions and competing art histories. Each painting draws upon the history of abstraction, with particular reference to Expressionism and hard-edge painting. Her work entwines dramatic contrast, chaos and control, the synthetic and the organic, flatness and depth, and the atmospheric and the geological. She works improvisationally, establishing and revising self-imposed parameters as each painting develops. Typically working without source imagery or preliminary sketches, each work is the result of an immediate and formal conversation between the artist and what is happening on the surface of the canvas or paper. _Liminal Reveries_ is the embodiment of memories of experienced landscape, the passage of time and the different ways that light, shadow and natural phenomena play with our perception. The works resist representation, articulating psychological states rather than specific places. Authier navigates the push and pull of her materials and mood, documenting her complex reactions to her surroundings. With this newest series, Authier explores the thematic potential of the threshold. Employing dramatic light, shadow and the layering of gesture and form to engage with the elusive and the ephemeral, her compositions evoke transitional spaces and the impermanence of time. Her vibrant compositions capture various situations where color, form, and mark-making mix and interact—absorbing, sinking in, and offsetting expectation by inviting chance. Authier’s proximity to the Atlantic Ocean inspired a sense of buoyancy that is immanently captured in these paintings. Evoking the beautiful and the sublime, Authier engages without hierarchy, a seamlessly interwoven multiplicity of references that invite the viewer to enter, navigate, and construct order within her abstracted, liminal worlds.