Cue up the Melanie, because while I’m usually not great at tooting my own horn, I am really excited to share some images and install shots from Nothing but Net, a truly excellent group show that I am included in, curated by Alex Ebstein and (SAS alum) Amy Boone-McCreesh. The show opened on September 19 and is on view at PFA Gallery’s Kensington, MD location through November 28.
I’m sharing some lovely professional photos and install shots of my work and the show below, although I hope that some reading this can go see the show in person, because no photo can capture the full dynamic of the larger conversation amongst the pieces that occurs in the actual gallery space. In my mind, this is what makes a group show successful. Not the individual stardom of any one piece, or the individual pedigreed trajectory of any one artist, but the way that works pull together as a whole to create something new. Like a visual poem that is both full of meaning and also beyond words, one piece finishes another’s sentence, each one picking up where another one trails off.
I’m including the show statement from the press release below. For more info and images from the exhibition, head on over to PFA Gallery.
xo, Lauren
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Lauren Rice, Wild Thing, 2025, Photo by Vivian Doering. Courtesy of PFA Gallery |
PFA is pleased to announce Nothing but Net, a group exhibition curated by Alex Ebstein and Amy Boone-McCreesh, presenting nine contemporary artists: Eleanor Anderson, Amie Cunat, Regina Durante Jestrow, Jody Joyner, Meg Lipke, Evan Nesbit, Gelah Penn, Lauren Rice, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. The exhibition brings together artists who subvert, recompose, and bend the limits of the line through abstraction, with the works that invoke or challenge contemporary questions towards notions of the grid, material and medium.
Nothing but Net will be on view at PFA–Kensington., located at 4228 Howard Ave, Kensington MD 20895, from September 19 through November 28, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 19, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM.
Nothing but Net presents practices that expand the application of the grid across spatial dimensions, incorporating both wall and floor, and extend material explorations from paper to nylon, ribbon, and additional flexible media. Nets are traditionally used to hold or to capture - in basketball, the phrase nothing but net celebrates a clean score, suggestive of skill or precision, one that comes from hard work and practice. The artists in the exhibition painstakingly repeat processes that they have created for the purpose of art making - looping, weaving, cutting - the associations of labor and work are embedded in the pieces. Nets have an undeniable visual presence and yet are not solid. The amount of negative space, color, and overall scale work together to aid in how a viewer’s body could interact with the work and ultimately, its function. Through a consideration of repetition, the artists engage themes of presence, labour and tactility. While the grid has long served as a foundational tool in abstraction, here, its historical modes of organising space offers precedent, as an armature for experimentation and re-thinking. Though grounded in physical grid-like patterning in each piece, notions of the net function as a conceptual system that invites viewers to examine structural interactions across the gallery.
Assertively contemporary while echoing historical strategies, the artists confront, query and destabilize logic, transforming quotidian materials and conceptions of space through playful, tactile, and process-driven interventions. Evan Nesbitt manipulates acrylic paint as it hardens, while Gelah Penn constructs composite assemblages from industrial substrates. Both artists challenge histories of tactility in painting and uses of conventional material in unexpected ways. Notions of suspension are called into focus through Jody Joyner’s remixing of recognizable textures to reorganizable perceptions of transport, access, and consumerism, resonating against Amie Cunat’s vivid works that snap the organic into a geometric precision.
Multiple materials work together across the gallery, invoking what Rosalind Krauss established as ‘the expanded field’. Meg Lipke’s dimensional sewn canvases lean and slouch, blurring lines between painting, sculpture, and support. Lauren Rice manipulates paper through practices of folding and cutting as intervention, to create reconstituted visual compressions. Eleanor Anderson’s woven, adorned, net-like installation is echoed in Regina Durante Jestrow’s patterned fabric installations which hang, situating triangular quilting techniques that call to the webs of personal narratives. Family traditions and abstract historic practices in craft that invite gathering and sharing networks are also referenced. Concurrently, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s mark-making through acts of cutting, twisting, and dyeing canvases splices the picture plane, viewing the canvas an active, attentive and occupied space.
This group exhibition focuses on artists who rework the grid and its network of associations through art history and the contemporary: as material and methodology for abstraction. With hanging assemblages, optical puzzles and soft sculptures, the works provoke, surprise and halt, encouraging contemplation of artistic practice through the notion of a net. Bringing nine practices together, a web of formal and conceptual intersections is established, where the net is conceptualised to explore systemic boundaries and what slips through.
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A P.S. for the long-read; totally worth it crowd:
Something else that brings me joy at the end of a week that can only be described as giving real “hell is other people” vibes, are my students and their work ethic. Right now (if you’ll allow me a wee kvetch), it’s the tail end of the sixth week of the semester and my introverted self is feeling a bit beleaguered and worn by the (giving in to my tendency to over-dramatize here) the trials and tribulations of the academic lyfe. The teaching part of academia is the part that I love the most, that, in spite of its challenges, always manages to be rewarding in multiple ways. There’s not a lot that’s better than observing students build and expand their technical and conceptual skills in the world of drawing and painting, both learning to see, translate and engage with the world around them. It’s very inspiring and cool to witness these voices being cultivated and honed, as well as a reminder to not sweat the small stuff because the teaching (not the barrage of mindless minutia) is the point.
