Contributed by Lucas Moran / Maybe death isn’t final but simply a door leading into another room. That feeling ran through “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” an excellent group show at The Active Space in Bushwick curated by Patrick Bower and Robert Zurer of Immaterial Projects. It tapped into whatever lies just beyond perception: the subconscious, the occult, the spirits, the talismans, the circus freaks. Everything half-seen or half-remembered was allowed to take shape. If contemporary painting has drifted away from figuration and identity, this show suggested we may be heading towards something more concealed – art that conjures rather than describes, call it hiddenist painting, embracing what is buried, invisible, or occulted, where death, memory, and imagination loop into one.
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If the show had a ringleader, it would have been Judy Glantzman, whose work has long confronted the psychological underbelly. Both paintings harness a tortured, Bacon-like quality – tormented faces and figures imprisoned in the in-between. Her surfaces are battered and unglorified, her palette muddled ochre, umber, and Venetian rust. The scraped, weathered paint reads like a flickering animation of overlapping spirits, a flipbook of trapped souls.
Amy Chasse, Night Swim, 2025, pencil and oil on canvas, 42 x 30 inches
Amy Chasse’s Sewn Figure and Night Swim center on beings that revel in the pleasure of their own creepiness. Ruby Hewitt’s monotypes nod to Henry Darger, but instead of prepubescent fantasy, they veer towards Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – a strange hybrid of Egon Schiele and Beavis and Butthead. Heavy metal energy meets surrealist line drawing: youthful, angsty, horny, and disturbed.
Amy Morken’s works on paper feel like a carnival parade of clowns with smeared makeup, bodies and limbs tangled in chaotic motion. The frenzy recalls early Pollock, though the sensibility remains rooted in illustration like Warhol’s commercial shoe drawings.
Amy Talluto’s Golden Ingres and The Ingres Thought of Many Things look outright haunted. The first is a glowing yellow bust with electric-blue eyes; the second presents a pair of eyes hovering at the center, glyph-like symbols drifting like fragments of an untranslatable dream.
Karin Campbell’s large mixed-media collage resembles a dark, watery puddle that becomes the stage for a family portrait: elongated arms and stitched faces awkwardly embracing. One figure, holding a carving knife, stares out, the brownish-pink face marked by wandering strands of hair, while two children hover in a moral tug-of-war over whether to prevent or assist in the butchering of the other parent. Her second work, a small oil on canvas, depicts a suspended ghost figure with an orange-pink aura streaked with teal and violet, hovering over an indigo field. These pieces feel indebted equally to Marlene Dumas and Katherine Bradford.
Carlisle Burch’s paintings present architectural lines and monoprint transfers boxed out like trap doors to another dimension. Lauren Tsipori’s unstretched tapestry Still Got That Dog in Me is gothic-pastoral scary, with animals that look like contorted figures from an Arshile Gorky landscape beneath a stained, moody sky. The show’s lone sculpture, by Matt Richards, is a zany collection of spindly green forms resembling extruded Play-Doh. Whatever it is, it’s not from this planet.
The curators, painters themselves, are clearly part of this burgeoning phenomenon. More artist-curated shows like this would do the New York art world good. Too many Chelsea and Tribeca exhibitions feel rote and predictable. This one arrives with its own thesis, its own atmosphere, its own world. Perforce, it builds community, reinforces shared interests, and strengthens the voices of artists working outside prevailing trends. Venues like The Active Space are giving the witches and warlocks of today’s art world a place to gather and conjure.
“Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” The Active Space, 566 Johnson Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. November 7–22, 2025.
About the author: Lucas Moran is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. His paintings have been included in many shows in the United States and Canada, and he has had several solo shows in New York City.
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Review is wonderful and articulate summary of the raw, energetic, Id-loaded work in this exciting exhibition. Ruby Hewitt’s monotypes with their unsettling, yet thoroughly satisfying scale shifts and narrative suggestions are standout representatives of the overall zeitgeist of this show.