Alchemies of Place
January 23–March 6, 2026

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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
Jonas Wood
Gina Werfel

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“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

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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.

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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.

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The artists featured in Alchemies of Place are inheritors of this lineage. In Suzanne Jackson’s Untitled Life Study (c.1968), a lone figure emerges and dissolves back into its surroundings, blurring distinctions between body and ground. The washes of ink and gouache behave like atmospheric fields—mist, water, or light—so that the “background” functions as a kind of interior landscape. While Jackson rarely paints landscape in the traditional sense, her work is deeply invested in how space is felt, inhabited, and transformed, positioning landscape as an active, relational force rather than a backdrop.

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Vivian Springford is best known for her stain-based abstractions, which suggest cosmic and terrestrial forces while fusing Abstract Expressionist energy with Color Field lyricism. In Thrice a Blue Moon (1977), she draws from the phenomenon in which volcanic dust scatters light, making the moon appear blue—turning the earth’s combustion into gesture. Her work Morning Glory (1972–1980) is similarly inspired by natural phenomenon named for one of Yellowstone’s larger thermal springs. Influenced by Taoism, Springford embraced the coexistence of creation and destruction. Both Springford and Jackson reveal how space—whether interior, psychological, or cosmic—can become a site for contemplation and experience.

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Throughout her time in New York and Maine from the 1950s until her death in 1999, Lynne Drexler masterfully blended her love of landscape with abstraction, using her teacher Hans Hofmann's “push-pull” color theory to create dynamic, musical compositions. Drawing from Impressionism, Fauvism, and even Pointillism’s focus on color, Drexler translated her sensory and emotional experiences of nature without strict adherence to representation. Continuing this legacy, Ashley Garrett’s passages of shifting colors capture the embodied experience of moving through space—hiking through the mountains, resting in forests, or observing light change over time. Often working on the floor, she moves around the canvas with full-body engagement, where perception becomes the structural foundation of the painting and gesture a diaristic record of her lived experience outside.

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Gina Werfel also begins in the natural world. Emerging from the plein-air tradition, she moved into abstraction, now creating vibrant, atmospheric compositions that highlight the natural world’s shifting conditions. She brings together multiple visual languages, balancing precise, graphic lines and stenciled forms with fluid, organic gestures to emphasize the push and pull between mechanical and organic mark-making. While Jonas Wood often translates everyday botanical and domestic subjects into graphic, flattened forms, his practice too is shaped by memory and recollection rather than direct observation.

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Around 1970, Joan Snyder developed what came to be known as her “stroke paintings,” in which gestural marks and brushstrokes are applied over a loosely gridded surface. Scrawled marks and fields of color suggest terrain, growth, and emotion in equal measure. The faint grid evokes human-made order, referencing roads, plots, or boundaries overlaid onto the land. Similarly, Deborah Hede frequently employs the grid as an underlying framework, signaling human attempts to measure, map, or contain space. Her subtle, intuitive works evoke landscape through material, pattern, and void—suggesting sky, horizon, or terrain without naming them outright.

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Joan Tanner also extends this dialogue through drawing which has remained a consistent thread throughout her career for more than six decades. In these often large scale works, dense accumulations of marks and gestures suggest maps, archeology, architecture, and cellular elements. Her drawings, however, are not illustrations but intuitive explorations of the potential of space and form. Lines flicker and collide, bend back on themselves; forms move toward coherence only to break apart. The page becomes a site of rehearsal—not preparation, but re-possession of a problem: How does a structure hold together? When does it fail? What is the threshold between balance and collapse?

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Born in Chippewa City, a remote Native American village in northern Minnesota, George Morrison became a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He transformed the rugged terrain, forests, and shores of Lake Superior into dynamic, gestural compositions and his work bridges modernist abstraction and Indigenous visual traditions. Inheriting this lineage, Terran Last Gun, a citizen of the Piikani Nation, draws from Blackfoot histories to abstract the sky, horizon, revealing the sacred geometries of the land. Created on antique ledger sheets from the 19th century, Last Gun creates hard edge abstractions though they are not without context. They directly relate to how his ancestors interpreted and documented the world around them after they were forcibly removed from their lands.

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Extending these inquiries into three dimensions, Anna Grace Nwosu brings landscape into clay, creating ceramic forms that echo topography, architecture, and ancestral memory where each form is created with an awareness of space and touch. In Claire Falkenstein’s Fusion series, form, light, and space are woven into dynamic arrangements that evoke landscapes in perpetual motion. The works are composed of welded metal armatures where pieces of glass are embedded then heated until the materials “fuse” together. This method allows chance, material behavior, and controlled structure to determine much of the final form, making process itself an aesthetic expression. Benjamin Saperstein’s furniture further expands the exhibition’s definition of landscape, translating material, structure, and spatial logic into functional objects that shape how bodies move through and inhabit space.

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Together, these works pose urgent and poetic questions: What remains of a landscape when its physical markers are stripped away? What truths emerge when land is felt rather than seen?

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As wildfires, drought, and development continue to reshape our environments, Alchemies of Place offers a meditation on loss, resilience, and the deep entanglement between the external world and our internal lives—reminding us that landscape exists not only outside us, but within.