Alchemies of Place

"Impressions emerge and intertwine in a process of making the work. Dream material, historical influences, things found and lost; all carry traces of human touch and imagination. The art balances between the personal and public; to coalesce into alchemies of place." - Deborah Hede COL Gallery is pleased to announce Alchemies of Place, a cross-generational group exhibition featuring works by Lynne Drexler, Claire Falkenstein, Ashley Garrett, Deborah Hede, Suzanne Jackson, Terran Last Gun, George Morrison, Anna Grace Nwosu, Benjamin Saperstein, Joan Snyder, Vivian Springford, Joan Tanner, Gina Werfel, and Jonas Wood. The exhibition traces a pivotal shift in the history of painting: the moment when landscape ceased to function purely as representation and instead became a site of abstraction, metaphor, and subjective experience. From the grandeur of the Hudson River School to the fleeting impressions of plein-air painters, landscape has long served as a means to observe, document, and idealize the natural world. With the rise of modernism and the accelerating pace of industrialization, artists began to look inward—reflecting not how the world is, but how it feels. The result was a radical reimagining of the genre: land rendered not through likeness, but through gesture, rhythm, material, and sensation.