On view at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center through Friday, Feb. 28, 2025

By Dana Tyrrell 
(image above: works by Dylan England)

From 2015 forward Hallwalls has regularly produced Amid/In exhibits that survey artists currently working in Western New York.

With a title inspired by the Beyond/In biennial exhibits spearheaded by the former Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the 50-year-old arts nonprofit has proven time and again the durability of chance and discovery within an arts scene as dense and talented as that of Western New York.

Beginning from studio visits paid to  artists as “exploratory prompts,” an exhibition eventually spins out of these conversations, albeit with no guarantee of cohesion among the ensemble or their individual artmaking practices. The 2025 iteration of the survey, however, offers more alignment across disciplines, subject matter – and importantly – vibes. 

Turning left into the gallery the viewer is brought before Sheila Barcik’s rough-hewn, painterly landscapes. Barcik’s paintings are rumbling inquests that do much more to think about how landscape is formed in our individual and shared imaginations than offering any one-to-one corollary for what our eyes process. Particularly striking from the series of square paintings, all acrylic on canvas, is Barcik’s sfumato, which works to preempt any definitive allusions to mountains or skies, and clouds the horizon of our mind’s eye enough for moments of absurdity with poppy-like black balloons and electric lemon mountains. 

Echoing this air of absurdism in decay are the found-object sculptural works of RJ Melnyk. Recalling Pompeiian remains of ancient individuals bathed in pyroclastic flow, Melnyk’s sculpture coalesces around a dark anxiety. All are composed of round heads with pointed teeth and coated by what appears to be dirt, adding to the air of having been exhumed. The sculptures stand and squat as minute sentinels, and are by turns wrapped in cloth tunics and stationed in vitrines-cum-repurposed materials, deepening their unnerving air of being watched and held in judgment by the long-dead. 

Ed Halborg’s works within this exhibition charts a path similar to that of Barcik and Melnyk in that the glyphs read as though they have just been unearthed. Made from cement on board, Halborg’s large format monochromatic gray paintings imbue an anthropological vision upon contemporary infrastructure, including factory facades, electric lines, transformers and anonymous facades. Confronted by this meticulously crafted work, it asks viewers to imagine a future where our technological and structural advancement has failed and whose leavings may be regarded with the same analytical and grasping understanding that has been applied to civilizations which far preceded our own. 

The human form takes center stage in paintings and hand-carved figures by Barbara Hart, in paintings by Sara Zak and the mixed media paintings of Nia Jael Bronner. Each of these artists use the form and traditions of portraiture as a starting point across varying methodologies. Perhaps the most straightforward of these is Hart whose artwork in the exhibit includes a series of oil-on-canvas portraits, each cinematically realized and stand-ins for personality archetypes. They each, however, seem to be imbued with a sentimental eerieness; dead-eyed, confrontational, glowering, and legibly rendered, they array into a murderer’s row of doyennes, dolls and heroines. The most recognizable of Hart’s work are the carved and illustrated figures which appear kin to chess pieces, each a working archetype whose round heads and bowling pin bodies belie the delicacy and craft of their creation. 

For Zak and Bronner, the figure is more furtive than Hart’s works. Bronner, specifically, opens up a view onto the experience of Black bodies as a site for polymath experience, with acrylic paintings inlaid with concentric and precise beadwork. Bronner’s paintings illustrate the black, female body as superhero, as reclining nude, as a bikini-clad flag waver, and a soitary figure in the snowy landscape. Each of these views offer crisp, iconographic images that work to highlight the singular presence and lived experience of Black people. Zak’s paintings, meanwhile, employ abstraction in the dynamic sense to point toward the fallibility of bodies within archetectonic space. Zak’s figures move dynamically through the picture plane and by turns multiply, stand, and dissolve. The most successful of these offer moments which teeter between complete dissolution and a Futurtist-like sense of movement throughout the composition. 

Where the former utilize the human form as a starting point, the artists who round out this survey employ abstraction visually and strategically. Dylan England’s collection of cut-paper collage works looks to nostalgia as means to dislodge legibility. His process involves delicately excised pages, whose whorls are overlaid onto found images to create dense fields of visual chatter and filigrees of gesture. These layers sit one ontop of another to mask their material origins, while simultaneously inviting closer inspection. 

The array of some 70-odd works by Dana Hatchett move the conversation on abstraction into an expanded arena. Facing the array, which daunts the viewer and encloses the periphery vision when taken in altogether, the artist’s pieces are each 15 x 12 inches and constitute an entire wall of their own within the gallery. It is evident that Hatchett composes with the weight of art history in mind, as the forms are by turns abstract, Abstract Expressionist, and Mondrian-ish in their interlocking, overlapping and smeared fields of color. Taken en toto, this Rorschach test of minimalism and painterly texture makes for enjoyable and encompassing viewing. 

Lawrence Kinney’s abstraction takes hold within the three-dimensional realm through a series of medium-scale sculptures whose undulating forms echo quotidian items made strange, including fortune cookies, flower planters, cut fruit and baby’s stacking rings. Their spun resin and pigment comportments dot the exhibition throughout, offering buttressing moments of cool resolve and high shine within the aforementioned players. 

For more information on the exhibit, which closes Friday, visit hallwalls.org.