Flirting with Abstractor

Curated by Shane McAdams

Flirting with Abstracter brings together six artists — Demitra Copoulos, Julia Bradfish, Chad Hallblade, Kyle Seis, Joe Steiner, and Lillian Supanich — whose work occupies the charged territory between observation and invention. Each begins with a recognizable relationship to the objective world: the residue of landscape, the memory of the figure, the architecture of an interior, or the accumulated impressions of lived experience. Yet these points of departure are continually augmented, revised, and reimagined, transforming the familiar into something increasingly elusive and non-objective.

Vestiges of the visual universe remain visible throughout these paintings, but they rarely settle into stable representation. Instead, forms dissolve into rhythms of color, shape, texture, and space. Compositional decisions become acts of translation, carrying the viewer from recognition toward ambiguity and back again. The resulting works flirt with abstraction without ever fully relinquishing their ties to the world that inspired them.

In this space between naming and sensing, the paintings invite a different mode of looking—one less concerned with identifying what is depicted than with experiencing how meaning is constructed. Color suggests atmosphere, gesture implies narrative, and formal relationships generate their own internal logic. At their most compelling, these works do not abandon objectivity so much as reinvent it, offering new pictures assembled from memory, intuition, and perception. Flirting with Abstracter celebrates the productive instability of that threshold, where the seen world gives way to the imagined and abstraction becomes another way of understanding reality.