The eight artists, each contributing one artwork, directly or indirectly responds to the complexities of 2020 using methods that vary from the figurative to the abstract, from the spiritual to the absurd.

Drew Bennett’s Lagoon Swimmers speaks to a renewed appreciation of nature—as sane, healing, and inseparable from human life—that has arisen during this year of forced contemplation. Heather Day’s Red Orange Epilogue, made from two sewn-together canvases, expresses the need to balance hard lines and boundaries with soft amorphous edges, in both literal and metaphorical compositions. Sandy Kim’s dreamy photograph of a youth’s blurred reflection comments on our inability to see ourselves with accuracy due to the fantasies we project onto others and ourselves.

Mieke Marple’s Queen Of Swords painting marks a return to spirituality, as is common in times of great uncertainty. The piece, which is covered with 24k gold leaf, presents spirituality as luxury asset—one of the many forms spirituality has historically taken. Greg Rick’s Race Wars painting illustrates the chaos of our polarized times and reflects on the arbitrariness of race. For there is no monolith black or monolith white, and, yet, the tyranny of anti-blackness exists and persists.

Adam Parker Smith’s Nikoxenos Amphora, featuring an ancient Greek rendering of the Death of Priam (King of Troy), reminds us of our long-standing fascination with violence and desire to depict it in art. Christine Wang’s 401K painting, featuring a cryptocurrency meme enlarged and expertly reproduced, points to the tangible importance of our intangible digital lives—as well as to humor’s ability to tackle, with a poet’s efficiency, topics both dark and unwieldy. Zio Ziegler’s small minimalist painting, Radical Simplification of a Complex Reality, 2, isolates complexities from his other series (currently on view at Ever Gold [Projects]) into a series of simple, bold black oil marks on raw canvas, asking us to rethink what we see or don’t see—i.e. how we preserve reality.