Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Field and Stream of Consciousness, a project space exhibition by Chicago-based artist Ann Toebbe, her first with the gallery. Across seven works, Toebbe charts the passage of time through depictions of her home and a rural Indiana farm acquired by her ancestors in 1874. Oil and gouache paintings show an uninhabited house surrounded by working farmland, scenery reconstructed from extensive childhood memories and visits to the vacant building as an adult. Omitting documentary details one might expect in a photograph, Toebbe articulates the landscape as if seen in a dream, instead featuring subtle references to cycles of crop cultivation to situate the images within a lexicon of personal history. Mining parallel themes of isolation and belonging, Toebbe ruminates, through her own autobiographical explorations, on how our relationships with locations shift and grow more complicated over time. Incorporating collage elements for which the artist is well known, the exhibition’s interior scenes transport the viewer to her longtime Chicago home. Toebbe, examining the diaristic aspects of domestic spaces, presents accumulations of wear and tear as evidence of lives lived and choices made, mirroring her own progression through life. Beneath a magnifying glass, seemingly mundane facets of day-to-day living speak not only to anxieties in the face of aging, but also the joy and comfort of knowing oneself. Viewers encounter a worn out mattress with dual indentations and a fern atop a heater which, in spite of drying out each winter, revives and persists. Such details hint at the ways our decisions, some haphazard and others deliberate, play out over the longer term, pushing us to adapt and evolve or, embracing established rhythms, persist contentedly.

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Blue Ablation, David Benjamin Sherry’s sixth New York solo exhibition and his first with the gallery. The presentation features six large-scale photographs from his recent expedition to Antarctica alongside five new oil paintings. Sherry’s longstanding engagement with the American West and humanity’s fraught relationship with nature takes an expansive step forward as he turns his lens southward to the glaciers and icebergs of Antarctica. In Blue Ablation, a title which references the destruction of glacial ice and, relatedly, our own bodies, the artist pairs large-format analog photographs, rendered in vivid monochromes, with abstract paintings inspired by the atmospheric conditions and ice drifts of this enigmatic landscape. Capturing both Antarctica’s sublime beauty and its rapid transformation under global warming, Sherry moves beyond documentation to confront change itself. This new body of work engages legacies of exploration and exploitation while deepening Sherry’s own focus on queerness, spirituality and our survival as a species. Painting has become central to Sherry’s practice in the past five years, a shift that began in 2020 when the pandemic restricted his access to the darkroom. Extending his use of the monochrome and photographic language into canvases, Sherry’s paintings offer alternative visions of the Antarctic that reverently foreground entropy and transience. They move beyond fact into atmosphere, light and sensation—offering a lasting mental afterlife and connection, rather than a fleeting impression. Through these mediums in tandem, Sherry attempts to redefine landscape—not as passive scenery, but as deeply charged spaces which both reflect our past and presage our future.