Entering the second-floor space in the South End, Gallery VERY is warm, with almost-spring air floating through an open window. Such a pleasant breeze brushes past three slowly revolving sculptures suspended from the ceiling. Audrey Goldstein’s Ephemeral Bodies (2024–2025) are collections of fabric, wood, and other materials that take delicate, amorphous forms. Rotating in the air, the sculptures appear weightless. At one angle, they evoke a figure, which rotates to become a landscape, which rotates back to become a clump of rubble.
No singular piece in “Disintegration” reveals itself completely. The show, a collection of work by Goldstein alongside painters Dana Clancy and Cristi Rinklin, presents things that have fallen apart and been put back together.
If Goldstein’s sculptures collect space, Clancy’s diaristic paintings collect time. Each small canvas gathers all the whirling moments of the artist’s life like flypaper. Layered over bits of newsprint, Clancy’s paint snowballs passing moments into abstract compositions. The three figures of Visit (July) (2025) feel less like separate individuals, but rather three snapshots of one fluid movement. Now they’re frozen and stacked alongside one another, stunned right as the spectator appears to catch them in the act. November (night) (2025) and September (Dusk) (2025) compress time similarly, each canvas moving through shifts of purples and blues and yellows, grounded in their respective season and time. No piece speaks to a precise moment but to the collected and individual experience that led to its creation. Clancy’s November is condensed to a square, blue-purple canvas, revealing time that has passed and concealing the details in abstraction.
The centerpiece of the gallery is Cristi Rinklin’s Here After (2025), which grounds the show as one of delicate anxieties. At a looming ten-foot width, Here After morphs and bends landscape into a changeable thing, presented as an amalgam of snapshots and passing glances. Shapes and forms slip between foreground and background, and hazes of smoke hang over portions of the composition refracting color and obscuring the forest scene. The forest seems fleeting, vanishing as the environment changes. Yet Rinklin does not paint an apocalyptic wasteland left behind, but rather the forest as a collection of all the ways it can be known. The centennial tree tops toward the back of the composition are not grazed and chopped to stumps, but distant, hidden away in the haze of an old photograph, protected in this memory from any grubby hands attempting to shape the land.
With “Disintegration” even immediate experience is uncertain. The three artists engage with a present that is distrustful of the past and unsure of the future. Rather than give into the fear of uncertainty, the show depicts a present made from alternative ways of knowing and collecting the past.
“Disintegration” is on view through April 5, 2025, at Gallery VERY, 59 Wareham Street, Boston.
