Spencer
Brownstone
Gallery

Exhibition

Second material
Abby Cheney, Krista Clark, Adriana Gallo, Jane South, & Szabolcs Veres
June 11 - August 14, 2026

Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition bringing together the work of Abby Cheney, Krista Clark, Adriana Gallo, Jane South, and Szabolcs Veres. “All things are in a state of flux, and everything is brought into being with a changing nature.”1 Ovid understood transformation not as destruction but as a kind of persistence — the same matter, the same senses, reconstituted into something unfamiliar. Each begins with the known: the logic of architecture, the objects of everyday life, the rituals of maintenance and labor. And in each, through their distinct practice, familiar forms transform into something altogether new, unstable, and revelatory.

1"All things are in a state of flux..." (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV, trans. David Raeburn)

Artist Bio

Abby Cheney explores how we assign value to objects based on emotion through her sculptures and paintings made from recycled cardboard, paper pulp, and found materials. Through using discarded materials as the foundation of her work, she highlights how we rely on things we consider disposable. Taking cues from household appliances, decorative trends, and domestic spaces, her works are humorous and precarious representations of how our homes and possessions become personal.

Krista Clark’s works are inquiries into the commodification of space and the standardization of building aesthetics. She incorporated new and repurposed materials to construct familiar forms in new spatial arrangements; displaced from their accustomed sites and settings. Formal gestures: overlapping, layering, stacking and cutting reflect the complicated and often compromised relationship we have with our built environment. While celebrating the formal characteristics of these materials and structures, the works attempt to question the presumption of a universal standard of aesthetic and spatial measurement.

Adriana Gallo’s practice deals with ecologies of labor, metabolic sublimes, dialectics of conviviality, and speculative production through installations, writing, workshops, lectures, and food. The installation is relational. It might very well be materially unstable: rotting, growing, melting, shifting. The installation’s meaning is its constitutive relations. The text is contingent. It reveals the nature of its container. The text scaffolds and diagrams its material companions. The workshop is transmission. It combines the didactic and the choreographic. The workshop is a process and relational prototype, mutually formed and primarily concerned with production. The meal is representation. It critically employs and represents systems and traditions. The meal implicates the eater and the eaten in a cosmology of agencies.

Jane South’s work delves into the formal in-between in new and sophisticated ways. Her characteristic architectural forms and pseudo-industrial material are condensed. The past emphasis on three-dimensionality, accentuated by boxes and cages, are flattened into grids and swaths of subtle tones. Her signature paper and balsa wood constructs are replaced by tectonic assemblages of softer materials -canvas, tarp, packing foam, and thread. Once tight and opaque, the application of color is now painterly and reductive. By flattening the shapes and softening the edges, South's new work offers, not just one, but a profusion of forms and images.

Szabolcs Veres’s painting practice fall firmly within the auspices of traditional portraiture, however his treatment of paint and subject matter challenge the definition as such. He builds his compositions through a process of collage and, when coupled with loose brushwork and a vivid palette, so denies the aesthetic intention of a painting, instead capturing something more visceral in humanity as a whole. By exploiting the tropes of classical painting styles and subjects, the result is an unsettling evolution of concepts of beauty, a tension between idealized figures and a grotesque reality. Veres reveals in his paintings the duality between interior and exterior, reflecting back the darker truths that lie hidden beneath the surface.