Paracosms

Carlotta Amanzi, Carly Burnell, Ted Gahl, Kristy Luck, Mimi Lauter, Shane Rossi, and Peter Shear

What does it mean to build a world within the world, or folded inside it, to treat imagination as a precise instrument attending to what can only be experienced, and, at moments, shared? Some artists announce worlds, drawing in their professional practices on the same depth from which childhood first invents its own, the room we never quite stop returning to, through materials, abstract codes, and sensations that enact the paradox of an interior made outwardly visible. Paracosms assembles the works of Carlotta Amanzi, Carly Burnell, Ted Gahl, Mimi Lauter, Kristy Luck, Shane Rossi, and Peter Shear, each at work in a distinct visual idiom. 

In Amanzi’s paintings, oil on cotton, figure, landscape, and atmosphere share a single chromatic register, a palette of weather and stone, where forms hesitate, refuse resolution, and leave earlier states legible beneath later ones. Her canvases carry a rhapsodic range of mind that feels ancient and interior at once. Le ore (2026), experimenting with oil and metal-ceramic on canvas, operates as both topography and duration, a place built from psychological terrain as much as an observational eye. Burnell, painting in oil, wax, and resin on linen, attends to time with similar care. A painter and poet, she lets atmosphere gather and disperse across the surface, layers built up and partly effaced, the veneer of landscape standing in for “a signifier for space, a visual portrayal of emptiness, a presence of absence.” precursory signs (2024) names something of her approach, shaped by materials, codes, and poetics mutable over time. 

Rossi, also working in abstraction, applies oil on linen at large scale, dense fields where looping linear movement rides across pointillist grounds, marks accumulated as touch. Figures surface and submerge in the density, gathering with distance. Shear, through a divergent application of oil, paints at pocket scale, planes of color and loosely defined geometries set in dialogue with poetry, compression and fragmentation given the weight of abbreviated form. The thinness of the paint, the way the canvas remains visible beneath it, becomes its own material world. Faint tonalities fracture into jolts of saturated color, the works fields of suspended recognition. He often photographs his paintings, returning to them through the camera, the image a means of distance. “What sends me,” he has said, “is artwork containing a spaciousness of address, which allows for my looking to become consuming and urgent.”

Luck allows organic forms to surface and recede before they can be named, soft orbs flanking a vertical brown form in Issue of Insight (2026), subconscious imagery moving through the field, a traffic between the visible and the invisible. Painting in oil on linen, she lets landscape and body collapse into one another so neither fully resolves. Luck has described painting as a way of facing what remains obscured: a matrilineal inheritance transmitted without record, a pressure absorbed into the work’s form. Her mother was among the Native American children of the Sixties Scoop, removed from their families and placed with non-Indigenous adoptive parents. Broken records and severed connections have left their maternal lineage indelibly incomplete. Luck’s process honors this incompleteness, expanding the fissures, intensifying their color, making them a bridge between place and self. “I am trying to find a visual language for personal melancholia,” she has said, “not as pathology, but as an illuminating discourse with myself.” 

Atmospheric and intuitive, Lauter’s practice inherits and renews one of the oldest forms of the paracosm: the garden, where order and germinal chaos take measure of one another. The garden, it is worth imagining in light of Lauter’s practice, is among the first inner worlds made outwardly visible. The artist builds saturated grounds in oil pastel and oil on paper, and oil on linen, carving back into them, a process closer to working clay than drawing. Her sensibility moves through the mystical and the visionary, lush botanical and spiritual imagery accumulating across dense surfaces, the garden treated as a sacred theatrical space, real and ceremonial at once. Dina Sefira (2024) functions as ritual space: the red field total, the white arc breaking it like an apparition, the handprint marking the body that conjured it. The painting operates as both ceremony and image, a private mythology worked into pigment. “I have always viewed painting as a theatrical space,” she has said, “that stage is haunted in deep feelings, a conduit to an altered subconscious state.” Imagination becomes a structure of continuity, a disciplined, felt mode of world-making, an attunement to a surface and the celebration of a moment, a refusal of the assumption that imaginative life ends with childhood, the inner room we keep returning to across a lifetime.

If the garden is where the inner world first meets the outer, it is also where painting turns toward nature to learn how nature makes form. Gahl works in oil, acrylic, casein, graphite, and colored pencil, building dense, all-over surfaces where mineral and growth are difficult to separate. Parallels (Norfolk Rocks with Lichen) (2026) gathers a stillness that carries hints of motion, drawing the viewer into a threshold where perception and landscape move together.

The haptic knowledge in these works, the pressed surface, the crushed pigment, the carved ground, gives form to what the Belgian-born French philosopher Luce Irigaray called “the interval,” the space between surfaces where sense is produced, and to what Gilles Deleuze, his eye on the seventeenth century, understood as “the fold,” never static, the record of a force, the trace of what has moved through. Both propose an invitation to attend to what is often overlooked, whether in pleasure, embodied knowledge, or atmosphere. A kindred intelligence runs through this gathering, present in Turner, vital to Deleuze for the work’s attentiveness to dissolution, gusts of steam, and the emergence of armature and color from chaos, as in Geneviève Asse, whose interstices and bands of color, at a personal and quiet scale, conjured other worlds and opened paths for a generation of painters. These contemporary works render interiority transmissible, what is made from inside meeting the viewer from outside. Placed in proximity, they yield a resonance akin to the fold yet as far from baroque iconography or agenda as these seven could be. The fold they enact is interior, scaled to a hand, a room, a microcosm, an approach to nature and observation, the private made, under the right conditions, available to others. A constancy, a reminder that a soul’s imaginative life has always been among the most serious things painting can attend to.