Canopy Studio, 508 W. 26th St. #6E

January 8-10, 2026

Opening

Thursday, January 8, 6-8 pm

NYC Crit Club is excited to present The Dualists, (or alternatively: The Duelists), a group exhibition featuring the 10 artists in Amy Lincoln’s Canopy Program cohort. The exhibition culminates a year of group critiques, discussions, and studio visits, as each artist challenged and supported one another while deepening their own studio practice. The artists in this exhibition examine the dynamic relationships between humans and nature, as well as between interior worlds (both psychic and architectural) and exterior ones.

Several artists in the show explore duality through unexpected combinations of abstraction and representation, or the sometimes-thin line between beauty and ugliness. Still other artists investigate the dueling nature of figures versus their environments, or the dueling desires to please and challenge the viewer.

Ana Wieder-Blank(they/them) combines figuration and natural imagery, painted in thick textures and vibrant colors to imagine a better world. Ana draws from biblical and mythological narratives and characters to create queer families and communities striving to heal from trauma and imagine new ways of education, grieving, governing and healing. Ana uses the tactile qualities of oil paint and clay to express the experiences of living in a differently abled, fat, genderqueer body.

Krithika Sekar’s acrylic paintings use bright color, abstraction, and graphic forms to express two sides of her cross-cultural experience shaped by her move from India to the United States. Her work explores the emotional landscape of migration and the cultural tension around femininity that exists across both places she calls home.

Working as Pencil Roots, Varsha Suresh uses exaggerated color, texture, and pattern to turn hidden corners of nature into immersive botanical riots that inspire a deeper sense of environmental connection.

Sierra Iturrino creates worlds that highlight the power of female archetypes and their innate connection to the Earth.

Myles Hunt lip-reads faces and paints portraits in pleasantly strange moments of candid emotion.

Laura Mychal blends different landscapes and views of our planet to create surreal worlds. Her work meditates on the beauty of nature amidst our estranged relationship to it, due to overconsumption, by incorporating found material and focusing on color and texture, envisioning alternative environments.

Caroline Otis Heffron creates transhistorical conversations between women across time. By layering figures with ornamental objects and cultural symbols, she composes vignettes that explore vulnerability and strength, presence and longing. The uncanny scale and color combinations create a new narrative that honors women on the threshold of transformation.

Anna Kiljunen works with abstract paintings and sculptures that originate directly from nature. Rejecting narrative, the works communicate through color, rhythm, and physicality, creating a unique language based on emotions and bodily sensations.

Noelle Timmons’ work is inspired by the vibrant West Coast environment she was raised in. Her paintings explore the associative iconography of landscape and its occupants, highlighting the sublime effects of chroma and illumination, and the haunting and salient qualities of perception and memory.

Eden Taff pulls from home and anonymous stock photography and historic artworks to paint figures, often semi-self-portraits, with attention to the stacking of human musculature in dreamlike spaces. Eden's oil paintings are derived from many pen and ink drawings in which she superimposes figures into home spaces and familiar landscapes to picture layered stories from her past. Eden works in limited palettes that emerge intuitively as she develops patterns, including stripes, rug grids, and repeating flourishes that organize the color and rhythm of her paintings.