stillness

Now more than ever, we need to find ways to hush the noise. It’s crucial to remain still as the world around us continues to fill our minds and hearts with stories of sadness and chaos. Rebecca Roberts works on paper, and John Roy’s paintings collaborate to create a visual and emotional calm that allows us to pause and enter a slower, quieter, more contemplative space.

Artist Statements

Rebecca Roberts:

These drawings capture quiet moments of noticing beauty in the world around me. They begin in the small pauses of daily life—while exhaling between headlines, stepping away from the noise of the news, the chatter of my children, the demands of family and work, or standing outside waiting for the dog to finish his business.

I take a breath and let my mind settle. I notice the way the light falls, the shift in color as leaves change, the steady sound of the river moving past. These fleeting observations become anchors—brief spaces of stillness within the noise.

Later, often at my kitchen table surrounded by the same chaos and conversation, I return to those moments. Through drawing, I relive what I saw and felt, creating a small, private mental space of my own.

John Roy:

John Roy’s work centers on the ephemeral, fleeting moments of the everyday. Using wax pastel on canvas and paper, he brings materiality to the forefront, allowing craft to shape the emotional and conceptual weight of each image. For Roy, the medium is not just a vehicle for expression but a subject in itself.

This body of work is rooted in experiences of nature—moments encountered spontaneously, then revisited through a careful and deliberate process of image-making. Each piece begins with a photograph taken in a moment of happenstance and evolves through a series of transformations, guided by a central question: When does technique and material enter image-making?

Roy’s practice is both intuitive and reflective, inviting viewers to consider not just what is seen, but how it is made—and why. The work becomes a meditation on presence, perception, and the role of the hand in translating memory into form.

Underlying Roy’s visual language is a conceptual framework rooted in the theory of line. His work examines the distinctions between the straight line—associated with constructed environments, repetition, and uniformity—and the natural line, which is variable, fluid, and irregular. This duality mirrors cultural ideas around identity: the straight line as emblematic of straight culture, and the natural, unpredictable line as a metaphor for queer identity—non-conforming, evolving, and deeply personal.

Roy’s images invite viewers to share in a sensory experience, to see through his lens, and to engage with the quiet, complex beauty of the everyday