Robert Berry Gallery is pleased to announce What Might Have Been, curated by Hayley Ferber, featuring new works by artists Mark Bouthilette, Gosha Karpowicz, Kelly Olshan, Steven Rudin, and Matthew Wood. The show will open on November 16th, 2022 at www.RobertBerryGallery.com.

What Might Have Been brings together five artists whose works dissect and recreate instances of time. Using collage, painting, and mixed media, these artists create abstract imagery that explores endless possibilities through reflection, memory, and hopes for the future. Considering and questioning alternative outcomes, these works presuppose the chance of manifold realities.

Similar to collage, the process of recollection can lead one to imagine what might have been if the pieces were shifted one way or another. Steven Rudin composes cutouts from an archive of expressive paintings he created over time, each panel representing our constant evolution, using collage as a metaphor for memory and identity. His multi-layered compositions draw viewers into a dialogue about the dynamic nature of the mind recalling elements of the past, present, and future simultaneously. Matthew Wood collages vintage chroma paper to create his biomorphagrams, a pictorial language that explores shadows as objects. His disembodied tangles of limbs deconstruct and abstract the human form through layers of overlapping shapes, creating an intertwined depth that merges reconstructed circumstances.

Paintings can act as a witness or snapshot of a passing moment, recording a thought or memory. Mark Bouthilette evokes Buddhist meditation on decomposition through his process of sanding down wet paint. The result of his additive and reductive methods belies the natural biosphere of rivers and arteries, veins and vines, and bones and branches leaving a topographical impression of imagined or undiscovered worlds. Gosha Karpowicz grew up observing changes of light and color in the landscape of Poland. Her paintings reflect a world where the forest shimmered in endless variations of green, yellow, and unnamable hues, the soil turning from black to brown to blue where the sky bled purple at dusk. Her abstracted colors elicit a dreamlike quality associated with long-forgotten memories.

Three-dimensional materials are used to construct an attempt to manifest an idealized future. Alluding to the aspirations and anxiety associated with navigating an illogical world, Kelly Olshan builds spatially impossible, physical, and illusory labyrinths. Olshan’s stairs and windows represent a link – both real and imagined – between where we are and where we want to go. Her staircases lead the viewer upwards, towards a destination just out of view.

Through various mediums and styles, these artists ruminate over real and imagined thoughts, memories, and experiences. By altering instances of reality they investigate whether different outcomes are even possible or if what exists is the only way.