BOSTON, MASS.- Gallery NAGA announced its 49th season of exhibitions, featuring Woven by Sophia Ainslie and The Woods by Kirstin Lamb. Both exhibitions will be on view from September 2nd through September 27th. A public reception will be held on Saturday, September 6th, from 1-3 PM, with artist remarks at 2 PM.

Sophia Ainslie's exhibition Woven delves into themes of identity, memory, and self-formation through her meticulous painting process. Ainslie builds her artworks through the repetition and accumulation of line, mark, and color, which create rhythm, structure, and a sense of time, reflecting the history of her artistic decisions. She likens her process to natural phenomena like weather patterns and changing terrains, highlighting constant motion and evolution.

Ainslie primarily uses acrylic and Flashe paint on paper, often incorporating sand from various landscapes, grounding her work in physical places. A distinctive element is her integration of photographic fragments, particularly images of beadwork and fabric from South Africa and the United States. These fragments, sourced from her personal collection of inherited and domestic textiles, are symbolic and recontextualized to explore dislocation and new relationships, reflecting a layered existence.

Woven explores the intersection of abstraction and representation, intertwining personal and cultural narratives. Ainslie's interest in hybridity—how different visual languages coexist—is central to the exhibition, acknowledging both the friction and connection within this coexistence. The paintings become a "weaving of self and story," a testament to the artist's ongoing effort to find meaning through artistic creation. This introspective journey reflects the universal experience of being shaped by multiple places and the search for coherence in layered identities. For Ainslie, painting is an act of holding and creating space for memory, movement, displacement, and belonging, addressing the questions that arise from seeking a sense of home in the world.

The Woods showcases Kirstin Lamb's intricate paintings exploring North American woodland spaces. Lamb, known for her labor-intensive paintings of gridded dots, has dedicated her most recent work to the singular subject of the woods. These new paintings offer a contemporary documentation of North America's extraordinary woodland spaces, drawing inspiration from panoramic and scenic wallpaper.

Lamb's process involves creating digital patterns from photographs of spaces she has explored on foot. These patterns are then meticulously painted on wet media acetate. While the patterns originate from photographs, they also abstract and blur the original image to varying degrees based on scale and complexity. The artist describes her painting marks as a blend of textile stitch, Impressionist mark, and digital pixel, reflecting the unique visual texture of her work.

A significant aspect of her practice involves the mixing and organization of color. Despite the intensive labor involved in each piece, the resulting effect is immediate and present.

Lamb's paintings navigate a fascinating space between focused Photorealism, computer-generated patterns, and a "fetishized repetition of an acrylic paint mark". Her intention is for the viewing experience to mirror walking in the woods: being surrounded by a fabric of green, an excess of detail. The labor embedded in each painting serves as a devotional homage to the complexity and slow growth of the forest. Through her work, Lamb aims to both slow the viewer down to a single greenspace and immerse them within many particular snapshots in time. She hopes to image the woods in their current state, as they exist now, near her. Lamb emphasizes the importance of documenting these precious resources, whether humble scrub brush or elegant old growth forests, as they are seen in our current moment.