The title of this small group exhibition is taken from the last line of Willa Cather’s 1905 short story, Paul’s Case. The protagonist struggles to match his aspirations to the life that is available to him and in the end, perhaps symbolically, manages a kind of integration. Much of Paul’s predicament seems to mirror the struggles of the artistic life, and these often find expression in contemporary art through the mix of hybrid and sometimes disparate media along with the sequential layering of tandem actions. One thinks of Jasper Johns’ axiom, “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” The five artists in this grouping seem to be doing just that.

In her Lambent series, Justine Frischmann takes photographs and digitally post-produces them, prints them on panels and paints over them with a combination of media. For her series, Over/Time: Imaging Landscape, Tama Hochbaum shoots multiple frames from a single point with an iPhone, stitches her images together into a gridded whole, and prints the result with latex inks on vinyl transfer material.

Susan Mikula shoots with expired Polaroid film, a medium she refers to as aleatoric, characterized by chance or indeterminate elements which she embraces. She then scans and reprints her originals, in this case as archival pigment prints on large sheets of Japanese paper. Olivia Sprinkel combines photographic imagery from her travels with her field notes and poetic text. Beth Davila Waldman layers photography, painting and collage, often referencing her extended practice as a performance, video and installation artist. All are concerned with nature and the impact of culture on the environmental order, the immense design.