By Land, By Sea, By Air
Doreen McCarthy, Guy Nelson, Rand Hardy
By Land, By Sea, By Air gathers the work of Doreen McCarthy, Guy Nelson, and Rand Hardy into a shared exploration of spatial and material experience. Framed through the lens of elemental movement—land, sea, and air—the exhibition considers how each artist uses abstraction, geometry, and physical process to engage with ideas of perception, transformation, and environment.
Doreen McCarthy constructs sculptural forms that are inflated and appear weightless and buoyant, yet are rendered in precise, durable materials. Her work often draws on the visual vocabulary of air and breath—space made visible through volume and line. With a formal clarity that belies its complexity, McCarthy’s practice invites viewers to reconsider the balance between fragility and structure, presence and void.
Guy Nelson’s paintings operate at the intersection of nature and abstraction. His layered surfaces suggest natural and imagined terrains—places that are mapped not only geographically but psychologically. Through subtle shifts in color, material accumulation, and gestural mark-making, Nelson captures a sense of land as something continuously formed, fragmented, and interpreted.
Rand Hardy works with abstracted and geometric forms to explore the tension between surface, structure and place. His compositions are built through additive and subtractive processes, resulting in works that feel at once architectural and organic. Hardy’s use of layered materials and geometric motifs gestures toward systems of construction and erosion, order and entropy. Rather than depicting the natural world directly, his forms evoke an internal rhythm—suggesting movement, dissolution, and the shifting frameworks we use to understand space.
Together, the artists in By Land, By Sea, By Air engage with elemental ideas not through direct representation, but through formal strategies that articulate presence, process, and flux. The exhibition offers a nuanced reflection on how abstraction—rooted in material and gesture—can serve as a means of navigating the physical and perceptual landscapes we inhabit.
by Jeff Feld