The Face is a Clock: New Portraiture (opening 6/12; closing 8/16) is a group show featuring a variety of artists and works, including those spotlighted in this year’s EcoArt Shop: Tattfoo Tan and Mario Mohan.

Events hosted by the gallery during the show’s installation include Art Meditation with Lizzie Marchand, as well as an open life drawing session and a watercolor workshop, both led by Eleanor Coulton and Ada Kaplan.

artist statements

Lyle Ashton-Harris

Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Born in the Bronx, New York, raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and New York, Harris obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University, a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art. Independent Study Program. His work is available from the following fine art galleries: Salon 94 (New York, NY, USA); David Castillo (Miami, FL, USA); Albert Merola Gallery (Provincetown, MA, USA); Maruani Mercier (Brussels, BE). Harris is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York.

James Esber

In early 2017 my anxiety grew as I watched an inept and pathologically narcissistic President fumble in his job. I hated the way his rambling diatribes often focused on undermining the freely expressed views of the press and fact-based reality itself. Early that year I was struck by a retrospective of Phillip Guston’s 1970’s Nixon drawings, titled Poor Richard. Brilliantly direct and enigmatic, they manage to capture a subjective view of a public figure in private moments. What impressed me most of all was how clearly they were tied to their historical moment. Soon after, I began my own Poor Donald series. Ostensibly portraits of the current president, these drawings combine some of his most recognizable features with a host of other references.

Marion Wilson

As a painter, curator and social practice artist Marion Wilson creates art that explores vulnerability and beauty and invites viewers into collective spaces to reimagine themselves in relationship to community and the environment. Raised as a small child campaigning with and for her father with her sisters and mother in  New York City, for two decades Wilson has built collaborative partnerships with botanists, architects, and mostly urban communities by accessing individual expertise. 

As an Associate Professor at Syracuse University from 2007-17 Marion Wilson institutionalized an art curriculum called New Directions in Social Sculpture as a result of her belief in the revitalization of urban and rural spaces through the arts.  She used recycled materials and unlikely collaborations to revitalize urban spaces through the arts. Wilson is the founder of MLAB and the Mobile Field Station (a mobile eco/art lab in a collaboratively renovated RV) that she then drove from Syracuse, NY to PULSE/Miami art fair collecting moss species all along the East coast and engaging communities in conversations , viewing and drawing about science and bryophytes.  From 2008-2016 she founded and directed 601 Tully—the renovation of an abandoned 1900 square ft residence that had become a drug house into a neighborhood art museum on the westside of Syracuse, NY. 

Wilson returned to painting after a 15 year hiatus in 2006 and began an experimental watercolor practice in  2021 at the same time she became the owner of the houseboat. She works in series; and has a daily morning practice of painting portraits. This particular series pays  homage to the women in David Lynch’s films,  catching filmic moments on women’s faces when they are in extreme moments of ecstasy, outrage, pleasure or pain - but always beautiful. Her lens is always feminist, political; seeing beauty and making a spiritual connection with the most vulnerable. This portrait series of Lynch’s women is reminiscent of her Last Suppers Series (2004) whereby she re-created in sculptural still lives the final meals of those on death row. Wilson’s work nudges us towards imagining ourselves as one of her subjects; reducing the space between ourselves and those who exist in the margins - through the beauty of her chosen medium.

John O’Connor

John O’ Connor was born in Westfield, Massachusetts. He develops his drawings through idiosyncratic systems, making visual what is ordinarily invisible.  He begins each drawing with a subject of interest and through haphazard research collects data and begins to experiment with it. He completes one part of the drawing, responds to what he’s put down in a Rube Goldbergian way, and continues until the drawing is complete. Chance is an important element of the process, eliminating a purely aesthetic and personal approach. The constantly evolving systems that O’Connor devises to construct the works exist alongside the final image so that his process becomes a visual element of the work; the concept of the drawing and its formal elements are represented simultaneously.

Sam Harmon

Sam Harmon is a multidisciplinary artist based in Syracuse, NY, working across sculpture, video, performance, and drawing.  The worlds she creates are familiar but unsettling, where beauty and brutality, humor and darkness, control and powerlessness coexist. We meet sad girls, bad girls, good girls, murdered girls.  She’s inspired by classical art archetypes and narratives, day dreams, surrealism, feminism in all its forms, imagining the ouvres of all the unsavory women living on the outskirts of town, Catholic church imagery, feminist film. She holds a B.F.A. from Syracuse University and an M.F.A./M.A. from SUNY Purchase College. Harmon’s new work, Elementary (a nod to elements and Sherlock Holmes), is a fresh take on her 2007 lipstick carving series, Maybe She’s Born With It, which she made as a 19 year old art student. This time, Harmon revisits lipstick as a sculptural material—carving miniature replicas of iconic sculptures from art history (with the exception of Clara, who is a face in the clouds), while paying tribute to women whose lives were brutally cut short by violence including:

Venus Stewart (Michigan, April 2010): A 32-year-old mother of two who disappeared from her parents’ home and was later found murdered by her estranged husband, who had plotted the killing in disguise.

Venus Xtravaganza (New York City, December 1988): A 23-year-old transgender performer and member of the legendary House of Xtravaganza, Venus was found strangled and hidden beneath a hotel bed; her murder remains unsolved.

Egypt Covington (Michigan, June 2017): A 27-year-old singer and beloved community member, Egypt was found bound and shot in her home; her death shocked a tight-knit town and led to years of advocacy for justice.

Clara Smith (Martha’s Vineyard 1940): A 72-year old widow studying diction in East Chop was raped and beat to death by a perpetrator who climbed into the window where she slept. 

Harmon became particularly interested in the murder of women at the hands of men after the birth of her daughter in 2016- feeling shock and horror how once lives of women and girls are reduced to objects, violated, discarded in the most heinous ways by men closest to them. At the time, her partner was consuming a great deal of true crime media, Rebecca Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions was published in 2017, and Harmon began following Women Count USA, a project by Dawn Wilcox that maintains a comprehensive database of femicide victims in the United States. These influences sparked a contemplative practice of paying homage to murdered women through tributary sculpture—work that seeks to pull these women from the recesses of history and return their names, bodies, and stories to public memory.

Aubrey Longley Cook

Aubrey Longley-Cook (he/him) is a Los Angeles based artist who creates hand-stitched embroideries and stop-motion animations. He combines traditional craft- making with new media to transform and reanimate images through stitched abstraction and pixelation.

I stitched these portraits of Ella and Hydrangea as part of a series of embroidered drag performers back in 2017 and 2018 for the exhibition Class Pictures at Kennesaw State University curated by Teresa Bramlette Reeves in 2018. Since then the series has been shown in LA, NYC, CDMX, Buenos Aires, Palm Springs, Minneapolis, and West Palm Beach. The series is called Village Queens. They are portraits of drag performers from my Atlanta queer community and offer a view of the scene at the time in East Atlanta Village. The hand-made cross-stitch portraits are based off of photos that I took or are inspired by selfies taken by the queens. I worked with each of them during the design process to create embroidered portraits that best capture and honor their unique and iconic looks. Through the repetition of the craft-based process I seek to document and honor these identities and with the detailed network of threads reinforce the connective familial ties that bind us. Drag queens have long been activists and leaders in queer communities, and they need our support right now.

Kristin Leslie

Kristin Leslie is a contemporary emerging painter whose work interrogates the relationship between intuition, emotion, and abstraction. Leslie’s practice is grounded in the spontaneous, fluid process of gestural painting, where color, texture, and form converge to evoke complex psychological states and moments of transformation. Her dynamic compositions, which embrace imperfection and uncertainty, engage the viewer in a visceral dialogue with the materiality of paint and the act of creation itself. Through bold, instinct-driven brushstrokes, Leslie’s work becomes a site of constant flux—a visual manifestation of the tension between control and surrender. I paint vaginas as a site of material and symbolic power. Through abstraction, I engage the feminine body not merely as form, but as a source of wisdom, embodied knowledge, and creative force. My pieces are visceral and alive—pulsing with raw honesty. They invite viewers into an intimate physical and emotional space, encouraging them to move beyond the word “vagina” and into an experience of presence, sensation, and deeper meaning. The vaginal form, for me, transcends anatomy. It is a visionary, generative site—one that holds the stories of our lineage, the pulse of creation, and the energetic blueprint of life itself. I aim to reclaim and uplift the vagina and womb—not as taboo, shameful, or hidden, but as sacred origins. These are not “dirty” words; they are names of power. Without them, none of us would exist. My practice is rooted in honoring the feminine, not just through representation, but through relationship. I paint yonic forms not as static images, but as portals—spaces to hold, witness, and celebrate women in their wholeness. I want my work to encourage women to come home to their bodies, to feel into their depth, and to meet themselves not just through intellect, but through sensation, intuition, and memory. It’s about listening inward, connecting with their yonis, and remembering who She really is.

Abby Carter

Abby Carter is a portrait painter, doodler and children's book illustrator who doesn’t draw within the lines. Straight angles don’t exist in her work, and her wobbly lines always encircle vibrant colors, expressive faces and unusually patterned outfits. At eleven years old, Abby fostered her love for curvy lines when she started a card business with her grandmother. After creating unique characters for each card with her imagination and tiny fingers, her Grandmother sold them. Years later, while watching her feisty two-year-old daughter spin around her living room, she and her husband started the juice company Fresh Samantha. With her illustrations of the curly-swirly headed Fresh Samantha on each label, she satisfied both her love for nutrition and desire for the non-linear.

Abby continues to illustrate quirky characters in her whimsical style today in imaginative children’s books such as Daddies Do It Different by Alan Lawrence Sitomer (Hyperion Book CH) recently featured in Parents Magazine’s June Top 10 List, Scooter in the Outside by Anne Bowen (Holiday House), The Best Chef in Second Grade by Katharine Kenah (HarperCollins), Andy Shane and the Queen of Egypt & Andy Shane and the Barn Sale Mystery by Jennifer Richard Jacobson (Candlewick Press), Maggie’s Monkeys by Linda Sanders-Wells (Candlewick Press), and Emma Dilemma Series written by Patricia Hermes (Marshall Cavendish Corp) and more.

I painted Kilmar Abrego Garcia because we need to see him. He is not only a man with a wife and two children who was unjustly deported to an El Salvadoran prison, but if ICE continues to act with impunity and as a direct arm of Trump, he could be you or me. 

In 1930s Germany, many ordinary citizens justified the rise of the Gestapo by insisting that only “bad people” had anything to fear. Today, Americans are told the same thing. But justice is not a system of guilt by accusation. And power that escapes accountability rarely stops on its own.

                     Noria Doyle Apr 16, 2025

                     Milwaukee Independent

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a Black queer interdisciplinary artist always working at and envisioning the intersections of poetry performance collage and watercolors. Her work is both personal and political, often rendering those felled by violence , or historically erased.  She works between portraiture and abstraction. With her recent performance, Big Mama Thornton and other Black queer femme blues singers who paved the way for Rock and Rill and all forms of Americana.   Her two paintings are of her close friend, artist photographer Nona Faustine, who died recently and known for her brilliant series “White Shoes”.  Sneed has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Poetry Project, The High Line, the New Museum, and the Toronto Biennale. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s “The 100 Best African American Poems” and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.

Stay up-to-date on gallery happenings by checking the events page!

Gallery hours: Thursday-Sunday 12pm-5pm