The Painting Center presents OnEdge, featuring ten contemporary artists whose abstractions dive head-on into both the literal and the metaphoric subject of the edge. Selected from among more than seventy artists currently on the Art File, a curated online gallery on The Painting Center’s website, these artists use color and line to evoke and/or confound the simulation of space. Poet Mary Oliver writes, “No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. … It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. … Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.” There are many kinds of edges we experience in life: a meniscus contains both liquid and pressure; a horizon both earth and sky; a shadow both substance and light. This mysterious quality, of simultaneously containing both separation and union, might also aptly describe the feeling of being ‘on edge’ in times like these, fraught as they are with suspicion and distrust. In one way or another, we are all engaged in the quest to, as exhibiting artist Anthony Falcetta has written, “examine the shapes and seams holding [our] surroundings together.” Another exhibiting artist, Lori Glavin writes: “With scraps of form and color I build spaces where I re-imagine, reinvent, and repair.

With the work in OnEdge, Patrick Burns, Anthony Falcetta, Astrid Fitzgerald, Lori Glavin, Celia Johnson, Julie Karabenick, Richard Keen, Scot Sinclair, Audrey Stone, and Jennifer Woolcock-Schwartz all demonstrate sustained and sophisticated practices that both address the formal characteristics of their medium and express their own experience of the world around them. In OnEdge, curator Susan Post brings together the unique and often extraordinary ways in which each of these artists grapples with what happens at the edge of a shadow.