UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

September 3 - 28, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, September 5, 6-8 pm

Closing Reception: Sunday, September 28. 2-5 pm

POETRY READING
Free and open to the public
Saturday, September 6, 2 pm

Elizabeth Strasser
“Water’s Edge”

Lesley Cohen
”Shift-Response”

Elizabeth Strasser
“Water’s Edge”

In this work I reflect on the encounter between water and earth: the lakeshore, the river bank, the ocean beach. This meeting place is a boundary in the natural world where elements react, oppose and meld.

The paintings are landscapes focused on the edge where land and water meet, without sky or trees, seen from above. In the ceramic pieces, I use colorants in the clay or glaze overlays to suggest the same meeting of earth and water in three dimensions.

Place has been an important part of my work. I have painted in many varied landscapes, often abstracting the natural forms from sites to evoke the essence of a location. In “Water’s Edge,” I am presenting the abstracted landscape in paint and clay as a transitional space, a place where land and water share an edge in a transient moment that is always evolving.  

There is beauty and comfort in the water’s edge—as well as a suggestion of its precarious state. I simplify landscape detail but use many layers of color, value changes and contrast to imply a landscape subject to immediate and long-term transformation.

Lesley Cohen
”Shift-Response”

Lesley Cohen’s new exhibition, Shift-Response, questions our relationship with uncertainty, to time passing, and to what shifts inside and outside of us: the why behind it all. The drawings are not about solving or fixing, but about holding the tension between what’s known and what’s still revealing itself. It’s about staying with ambiguity and change—subtle, persistent, and often beyond our control—long enough to see what might emerge and what it has to teach us.  

The exhibition invites the viewer into a quiet space where perception is not just visual, but visceral. Using black, white and a palette of grays, Cohen’s drawings explore how even small changes—on the page or in life—create a need to respond. The exhibition invites a slow kind of seeing—the kind that reveals more over time. These are drawings that can be appreciated at a glance, but look closer, and a deeper world unfolds—one built not on narrative, but on attention, tension, and the quiet unfolding of change.

Each drawing holds a moment in suspension—a tension both formal and felt. Each mark is a reaction, a response: to what came before; to a shift seen, sensed, or remembered; or to the resistance of the surface itself. This is drawing as dialogue—between tension and release, presence and absence, sensation and thought.

We can remain optimistic that even late in the story, we’re offered chances to begin again, to press reset, and to keep discovering what we didn’t see before.