Curated by John DeSousa
Featuring artists Luka Carter, Kelsey Renko, and Eli Thorne

Water Finds a Way fluidly draws on the expressive gestures of three artists working in the Hudson Valley. Fish out of water, urgent auras, and springing safety cones color Utopia’s dotted terrain. Whether strictly or metaphorically representing water, each artist conveys its liquid looseness through markmaking, form, and content. Carter’s comic ceramic vessels and fountains are enriched with whimsically dense drawings, illustrating a playful and transient daily life. Renko’s impassioned paintings explore the body, feeling, and intimate relationships through layered patterns, shapes, and lines in a turbulent flux. Thorne’s rapturous landscapes express righteous rage through sharp tsunamis while flying fish navigate spiritual scenes by way of hearts and stars. Together the artists’ hands celebrate vulnerability through tactile and abstract figuration with wonder and sensitive naïvete. Their relationships to water touch on timeless themes of love, floating adrift, emotional intensity, and the eccentric pleasures of pedestrian experience. Their dialectical flow and friction with materials counters the ubiquitous smoothness of an increasingly accelerating and online economy.