Spring Open
Friday, March 28th from 6 to 8 pm and Saturday, March 30th from 4 to 6 pm: Spring Open shows new work by artists Natasha Das, Steven Crawford and Gorazd Poposki
Natasha Das – Thread Paintings
As an oil painter for decades, I have been a keen observer of how light, color, and brushwork generate visual language. Yet in this new body of work, I interrogate the very substrate upon which my marks materialize. The question becomes not just what mark, but what surface? I challenge conventional notions of material, source, and perception –
This interrogation led me to reconsider the material, its origin, and the necessity for transformation in my practice.
The need for change emerges when one seeks deeper connection. This desire to forge more meaningful relationships has become the conceptual underpinning of these works. This comes from lived and personal experience. As a mother, I want my children to engage in meaningful bonds and not ones that make us superficially connected, in a world of networks, AI, or social media. I bring my technical understanding of oil painting into dialogue with thread and textile materials, allowing for a more visceral and emotionally resonant engagement.
The work is fundamentally tactile. The primary medium—Eri Silk—is handwoven by women who approach their craft not as labor but as a meditative act of creation. This silk is also known as Ahimsa Silk, meaning we kill nothing in the process of making this silk. It is not a rushed process and is not mass-produced, keeping one’s act and thoughts sustainable. These thread paintings inhabit a space between fine art and domestic craft traditions, challenging the hierarchies that separate them. They embody a collective narrative of patient labor, repetitive gesture, and mindful engagement with time.
Random lines overlap to create unexpected intersections and points of connection. These linear elements function beyond mere mark-making; they generate textural layers and vibrate with color, creating a visual language that speaks to both painterly and textile traditions simultaneously.
Thread Painting exists at the threshold of contradiction—where fragility and strength meet, where precision intertwines with spontaneity, and tradition converses with innovation. These works invite viewers to reconsider the binary oppositions we often take for granted, suggesting instead a more nuanced approach to material and meaning. Through this material exploration, I navigate the spaces between intention and chance, crafting connections that reveal themselves through the patient accumulation of thread. In doing so, these works invite viewers to contemplate their own relationships with time, attention, and connection in an increasingly fractured world. What threads bind us together? What patterns emerge from our seemingly random intersections? These questions hover in the space between the threads, inviting not answers but sustained reflection on how we weave meaning into our lives.
Steven Crawford – Botanical Studies
My work is shaped by atheistic philosophical thought, grounded in the belief that meaning and beauty arise not from the divine, but from our experience of the material world. There is no higher purpose imposed—only what we find, see, and create. My images invite the viewer into a moment of meditation—where seeing becomes an act of stillness, reflection, and connection to the transience of what surrounds us.
Flowers have become my primary subject—simple, accessible, yet infinitely intricate. Their fleeting beauty and complex structures offer the perfect medium to explore how we see, what we value, and how everything is in a constant state of becoming and passing away. Through light and composition, I work to reveal the interplay of form, shadow, and texture, elevating these familiar objects beyond their botanical nature. To me, they become sculptural expressions of light and space.
The Fragility of Hope Series
When creating this work, I found myself thinking about flowers as symbols of hope. Right now, so much feels uncertain, and hope itself feels fragile. By encasing these flowers in ice, I wanted to explore that fragility—the way hope can feel suspended, restrained, and waiting. The ice distorts and fractures their forms, much like uncertainty distorts our sense of truth.
Life is fragile, and this is a reminder—not just of its impermanence, but of the forces that shape and obscure it. What do we see when beauty is fractured? When time slows to a standstill, when something vibrant is locked in a state between preservation and decay? How long before the ice gives way—before what is held inside is lost entirely?
Gorazd Poposki – Figures & Pallets
Gorazd Poposki’s white marble sculptures capture the raw motion of nature—wind and water in flux—through layered textures, varied polish, and painterly shadowing. Fossil-like impressions emerge from rough, unpolished stone, where chiseled strokes evoke both storm and stillness. Sketching directly onto the marble, Poposki translates the fluidity of drawing into sculptural form, allowing light and shadow to shift dynamically across the surface. These works, hovering between abstraction and landscape, transform marble into something fluid, weightless, and deeply resonant—a monument to nature’s power and presence.
The Pallet series consists of mixed-media sculptures exploring a recurring theme in Poposki’s work. As a sculptor deeply engaged with the logistics of transporting materials and finished pieces, shipping pallets and containers have become both a practical necessity and a conceptual focus. These ubiquitous objects, often overlooked, are transformed into refined sculptural forms and installations, blurring the line between utility and artistry. Whether as freestanding structures or integrated into immersive installations, the works distill industrial function into minimalist elegance. One piece, a light installation, extends the pallet motif into a suspended composition, reimagining it as a wall-mounted or hanging chandelier that plays with form, shadow, and illumination.
