Into the Woods (M.Jenkins – DisCerning Eye, on Woodlands, Amy Kaslow Gallery, 2025)
Nature takes many paths at Amy Kaslow Gallery. Also: invocations of time, space, and struggle at Touchstone, Pars Place, and Cultivate Studios
Oct 03, 2025
THE CURRENT EXHIBITION AT AMY KASLOW GALLERY is thematically linked, but also something of a greatest-hits collection. The 13-contributor “Woodlands” includes work by artists who have shown at the venue previously, including Jaroslav Leonets, who expressionistically paints peaceful rustic scenes of pre-war Ukraine, and London’s Jane Kell, who usually makes half-abstract landscapes but whose two paintings in this selection include an unexpected closeup of a “Night Garden.” Its slashes of green and splashes of pink and orange are highlighted by their glistening ebony background. The picture’s format complements the tightly framed photos of gallery proprietor Amy Kaslow, whose large-format pictures examine bark, lichens, and moss and burrow into individual flowers.
Craft is integral to the gallery’s mission, and this show includes nest-like hanging baskets made of vitiver root by Madagascar’s Marie Alexandrine Rasoanantenaina and overhead bird mobiles fashioned from leftover wood by Colombia’s Juan Carlos Arango and Angela Matiz. Santa Fe artist Don Kennell and his team also fabricate birds, but from partly painted scrap metal that sometimes includes text. (”Courage” is spelled out on one creature.)
These metallic birds dovetail with local artist Kirsty Little’s wall-mounted abstract flowers, which she constructs from painted wire and such playfully anomalous found objects as a tea strainer. Renee Balfour’s wall sculptures are made of a natural material, wood, but are abstractions that merely hint at natural forms.
Other pieces also fit together neatly. The blocky shapes of local painter Bernard Dellario’s oil-and-gouache landscapes recall Leonets’s style, as do the cut-and-paste forms of Indiana artist Meg Lagodzki, whose pictures portray forests or, more intimately, ferns. Dellario’s loosely applied pigment has an affinity with the watery oils of Martina Dalla Stella, who in one picture foregrounds a tree that’s rendered entirely with swirling strands of drippy blue paint.
Aside from reverence for nature, what many of these artworks share is a sense of immersion, whether through literal depths or simulated ones. This is true whether the material is organic or industrial, lush or spare. Thus local artist Brandon McDonald uses just pen and ink and occasional washes to beckon the viewer into pastoral realms along the Potomac River or the C&O Canal. The hiking trails that serve as passages for the eye can also be seen as pathways into not just his pictures, but into all these depictions of forests and their inhabitants. To view woodlands is to, spiritually if not actually, enter them.