The creative dialogue and collaboration between Joan Harmon and Aubrey Roemer spans more than a decade. In Earthly Delights, they offer a vibrant collection of paintings and sculpture that explores their shared fascination with lush color, organic form, and the fertile tension between the natural and the surreal.

Brimming with riotous forms and saturated hues, the works evoke landscapes that feel at once familiar and otherworldly. They nod to the visible wilderness and the invisible forces that shape our world—realms that are as mystical as they are essential. In these works, the human figure is conspicuously absent. The garden—and the wild—speaks for itself. What remains are the earthly delights: vibrant ecosystems, symbolic flora, and abstracted landscapes that pulse with energy and life.

In uncertain times, creating art becomes an act of defiance, healing, and connection. The works in this show celebrate the resilience of the human spirit and its intricate, interdependent relationship with the living world. By decentering the human presence, Harmon and Roemer open a portal to the timeless, the wild, and the unseen—a tribute to alternate ways of being and knowing.

About the artists

Joan Harmon earned her BFA from the California College of Art and MFA from Rutgers University. She recently had a solo show at Garner Arts Center, and her work has been shown at LABspace, Perry Lawson Gallery, Epperson Gallery of Ceramic Arts, the Loveland Museum Gallery, Richmond Art Center, the Lewis Art Gallery, Millsaps College, and at the Governors Island Art Fair, among others. Harmon teaches at the City University of New York and has her studio and home in the Lower Hudson Valley.

Aubrey Roemer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Tennessee whose research focuses on precontact cave art. She received her BFA and MFA from Pratt Institute. Roemer has exhibited work nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Guild Hall, the Piramal Art Museum, the Long Island Museum, Pratt Institute, the University of Vermont, Taiwan Children’s Museum, among others. She has held residencies in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including at COPE NYC, Vermont Studio Center, 42 Acres (England), and Kio-a-Thau Sugar Refinery Artist Village (Taiwan).

The group exhibition Gradually, Then Suddenly focuses on contemporary notions of transformation. Through painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and ceramics, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the material, cultural, and conceptual underpinnings of every metamorphosis. Together, the works on view investigate how intent, nature, and chance—destructive and generative—can render changes, small and radical, in our perceptions, experiences, and communities.

Participating artists: Robin Adler, Karen Allen, Bob Barry, Daniel Berlin, Joel Brown, Nataliya Hines, George Kimmerling, Linda Lauro-Lazin, Nansi T. Lent, Soli Pierce. Eileen Sackman, Ilse Schreiber-Noll, and Pamela Zaremba. Click here for information on each artist.

This collection of mixed-media paintings explores the impermanence of place and the layered texture of memory. Rooted in Harmon’s classical art training and shaped by the international community she found in Italy— through shared music, dance, food, and deep conversations—these works revisit a chapter of her life that was once vivid and then packed away upon her return to the U.S. Now, 20 years later, she is “unboxing” those moments, finding beauty in what remains and what has changed.

About the artist

Anne Harmon is a North Dakota native now based in New York. She moved to Europe for 10 years where she studied at L’Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. Her work has recently been exhibited at Time & Space Limited, Lagstein Gallery, Perry Lawson Gallery, and LABspace.