Midnight Ride is a contemplative ceramic exhibition exploring our nation's mortality. Each hand-carved vessel incorporates memento mori motifs in low relief—skulls, wilting flowers, and other quiet emblems of impermanence—reminding us of the fragile, fleeting nature of life.

This body of work was shaped by the turbulent political climate in America. The instability and uncertainty coursing through the nation have served as both backdrop and catalyst—drawing a stark parallel between the precarity of our civic landscape and the inevitable truths of human existence. As systems unravel and futures blur, these pieces offer a grounded space for contemplation. By merging symbolic carving with everyday objects, Midnight Ride collapses the boundaries between function and philosophy. The show invites viewers to confront the fragility of our institutions and beliefs, and to carry that awareness with them in the quiet, daily acts of living.

About the artist

Eileen Sackman is a ceramic artist living in New York’s Hudson Valley. She exhibits her hand-carved ceramics nationally, most recently at the Ohio Museum of Craft and LSU School of Art’s Shaw Center for the Arts. Sackman also teaches ceramics at both the university and community arts levels. She recently was an invited artist-in-residence at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, she curates national and international ceramic exhibitions, and her most recent research in wood firing was published in The Studio Potter magazine in December 2024. 

In Unraveling Light and Time, photographers Pamela Zaremba and Síle Marrinan explore how light within a place can reawaken childhood memories and reveal how family is not fixed, but layered, revised, and reimagined over time. Through varied photographic techniques and the inclusion of personal family artifacts, the artists investigate the tension between emotional memory and historical record. Together, their works become stepping stones into the echoes of childhood—spaces where fact and feeling coexist, and meaning is continuously remade.

About the artists

Pamela Zaremba is a storyteller and an analyst of conscious and unconscious human nature. The world, from her perspective, is a conglomerate of all she has learned, becoming a mixture of fantastic theories from fairytales and the sobering awe of nature and reason. In her photographs, she tries to capture this curious perspective by investigating peculiar places and objects—from abandoned buildings to dead creatures. Her goal is to distill the human and sympathetic qualities from these subjects so others may see life as she sees it.

Síle Marrinan is a photographic artist drawn to the subtle, ethereal qualities of light. Her work explores the relationship between light, memory, and the passing of time. Through her camera, Marrinan observes how shifting light transforms familiar subjects, inviting new ways of seeing and evoking connections to memory and family. By seeking out moments where light lingers or transforms the ordinary into something almost cinematic, she finds a rhythm that slows time, allowing moments to become steeped in memory and linked across time.

As so many of us confront multiple breakage points in the worlds we inhabit, our ability to form a coherent collective or individual vision of these sites and experiences feels impossible. The photographs in Fractional Landscape attempt to give viewers an analog for the resulting sense of anxiety, loss, and rootlessness.

 Kimmerling began the project in 2019, the year his mother died after her almost 20-year descent into Alzheimer’s. Although he knew that the notion of a unified world or self was mythical, watching that truth reveal itself inexorably in his mother brought it home with lasting emotional and psychological force. This ongoing project also aims to construct an expression of place grounded in Kimmerling’s queer experience and the fracturing and fragmentation that attend it—a sense of dislocation and an ongoing need for psychological and emotional wayfinding.

Here, Kimmerling works against an approach to landscape photography that emphasizes grand vistas; a sense of access, exploration, and visual ownership of sites; and a technical, hyperreal perfection made possible in part by rapid innovations in AI and digital imaging. He shoots the series using the panorama function of an iPhone, but in ways that break the smooth, unified, 360-degree images it is designed to produce. The resulting distortions, fault lines, mashups, and fractures are all made in-camera in real time as he moves through and across these sites.

 About the artist

George Kimmerling has exhibited his work at the Cooper Hewitt, the New Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, as well as numerous galleries and nonprofit spaces in the United States and internationally. His work has an MFA in photography from RISD and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program.