Link to Exhibition Review by Tris McCall

Link to Exhibition Catalog

In Of Matter and Light, we bring the viewer into a sustained encounter with elemental forces: the weight of substance, and the delicacy of illumination as explored through the distinct yet resonant practices of Robert Glisson and Brooke Lanier. The exhibition is a meditation on how material and ambient phenomena coalesce, fracture, or linger between presence and evanescence.

Robert Glisson’s canvases begin in the open air, formed en plein air and later resolved in studio by memory. He pursues atmospheric reverberations and emotional tonality rather than literal topography, pushing color, form, and spatial relations just beyond the familiar to evoke an inner landscape. His compositions often straddle the axis between realism and abstraction, dissolving boundaries so that light becomes a participant in form, not merely its illuminant.

Brooke Lanier likewise navigates the fluid thresholds between earth and air, solidity and reflection. Known for her depictions of water, vessels, piers, and waterfront structures, Lanier combines a painterly attunement to gesture with structural sensitivity to built objects and their histories. In works drawn from her maritime engagements, and especially her long commitment as Artist in Residence with historic ships, she renders form as though caught between buoyancy and gravity, between vessel and void, between past and present. 

If Glisson’s landscapes ask us to dwell in the glow between day and dusk, Lanier’s marine architectures solicit reflection on what is held, what is floating, and what is half-glimpsed. 

Together, the two practices extend one another in a silent dialogue: how light penetrates surface, how matter responds to ambient radiance, how the seen teeters on the verge of becoming memory.

The works in “Of Matter and Light” engage optical systems, material and atmospheric residue. In Glisson’s paintings, fields dissolve at the margins; shapes exert gravity or yield to the heat of color. In Lanier’s works, wood, water, iron and pigment converse in forms veiled in reflection that become luminous, or slip toward suggestion. Across the gallery space, the viewing becomes a cumulative act of perception: the eye tracking shifts in tone, the body adjusting to subtle modulations of weight, hue, and transparency.

This exhibition suggests that matter is never fixed, and light never inert. They coauthor. The gallery’s volumes become their theater: in that interstice, each of us can become a witness to utterance, to the play of tangibility and radiance to the world that emerges when our seeing is as much feeling as recognition.

• Brooke Lanier CV link

• Robert Glisson CV link