That Which Remains

Exhibition by Leigh Ann Hallberg and Paul Bright

September 16 - 27, 2025

*Reception: Friday, Sept 19th | 6-8P

*Gallery walk-through with artists, 6:30p

More About That Which Remains 

Beginning with our hominin ancestors, artists have always made use of found materials, recovered objects, and their specific qualities to create art. But increasingly, materials for art became subsumed mostly as vehicles for depiction and expression; as a means to an end. The singular qualities of the materials of art begin to reassert themselves in the late 19th C, not merely coincidentally with the rise of photography. The photograph, so successful in recording the specificity of surfaces, the lighting and chiaroscuro of forms, the “facts” of appearances, allowed a medium like paint to more freely exhibit its inherent qualities, even when used in the service of depiction. (Much of Impressionism was structured and animated by this interplay of the physicality of evident paint and the expression it facilitated.) The introduction of collage in Cubism and the conceptual deployment of found objects in the work of Duchamp et al, brought intense focus on the materials of art as well as the proposition that art no longer needed be as created as it had been. It could be composed of preexisting things, found and repurposed objects, in a new, industrialized world of burgeoning objects of all kinds. The artist’s role in this context was largely that of selector – not unlike a photographer taking a picture – finding or stumbling across the right object to convey an intended meaning, a meaning which very often arose in part from the found object itself, which carried a history of past use and significance that intertwined with its new role as art object. Improvisatory, aleatory or chance methodologies often guided selection of the objects and the creation of these works. Our work in That Which Remains acknowledges this lineage and these approaches in varying degrees.

Our respective work is diverse in the forms it assumes, in its intentions, and in its stylistic permutations. But in That Which Remains, we are presenting works that share 

a focus on traces, palimpsests, residue, and remnants. With the commonality of being made from detritus, from the Found, of discarded parts and fragments, the works evince improvisation, construction, and accretion as compositional methods. The work is varied but coheres through conceptual, aesthetic, and visual overlaps. Our interventions on our chosen objects can be minimal or subtle, but they are significant.

Leigh Ann’s work evinces a preoccupation with lineage, phenomena of “nature,” and scales of time and experience, in both the outer and inner worlds of human experience and the related proportionality of abstraction and figuration. It incorporates manipulated and reconfigured heirlooms; a woman’s dress gloves (Chirality); a sectioned and reconfigured Murray Bay wool blanket (Murray Bay: Standing Wave; a broken plate with inscribed figures of a seemingly runic numerology (3:2); re-embroidered linens (Leighs, Nana’s Helix); and durational paintings called Accretions. She also presents an elegant metaphor for our toxic, over-consumptive present, Core Sample, a totem holding layered and compressed plastic waste, reminiscent of glacial ice samples containing the stratified atmospheric history of eons. 

Paul’s are fundamentally abstract works, even when they are composed of figurative or recognizable elements. They eschew or disrupt narrative. They traffic in advertising imagery – the “de/collages” of found materials and removed posters, the serendipitous Tear Sheets – and the found materials that pervade our lives (Just Like A Box). He is interested in how the physical degradation of their components mirrors their materialist and often retrograde messages. However, when these elements and ambiguous images are recontextualized in collaged compositions, they reveal an unexpected poetry. This is also elicited from the “aural quotidian” in his sound collages’ arrangement of found and recorded sounds (Wet in Dry), while the direct, minimal contrasts of topical printed matter (of Minor Interventions) opportunistically reveals the unintended irony or ready-made satire of their sources.