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

July 10-12, 2025

“Permission, Slip—both the phrase and the act. Permission to play, to wander, to step outside the bounds. A Permission Slip to leave the classroom—thank you! We’ll gladly take it as a small reprieve from the tyranny of structured exercises, off we’d waltz, slipping and sliding down the hall with our sketchbooks! ‘Sketching’ the bounds of permission? -Perhaps! But what does it truly mean to have permission? And what public holds the position to grant the Slip when it comes to what we draw, paint, or imagine? How often do we, as artists, look outward for affirmation—for some external nod that says it’s okay to use ‘this’ color, to fracture the rules of ‘that’ composition, to stray from familiar forms of representation, to be abstract? Hesitating at the edge of risk, there comes a crossroad in every artist’s project when a vital need to reclaim a sense of permissiveness appears. Not as a borrowed privilege, but as an inner stance—one that cannot be outsourced. To assert this stance from within is to reorient one’s perspective. It is to remember that permission to give shape to thought, ultimately, is not a fixed point, but a shifting passage- a slippery road where freedom emerges through the very act of seeking.”

- Delphine Hennelly, Canopy mentor 2024/25

Through the interplay of color and gesture, and the evocation of memories and fleeting moments, Permission, Slip features the work of ten artists exploring notions of identity, permission, and connection. Oscillating between landscape and interior, figuration and abstraction, this exhibition consists of over thirty pieces created during the Canopy Program.

Joan Hanley’s paintings explore human connection, using visual language borrowed from digital photography and cinema transferred to paint.

In her egg tempera and oil paintings, Jane McKenzie draws on a vocabulary of gates, walls, and archways to explore themes of containment and longing through landscape boundaries.

Sara Jean Odam's oil paintings are rooted in observation of domestic objects and spaces, and playfully wrestle with themes of intimacy, loss, death, transformation, letting go, and failure.

In Marie B Gauthiez’s mixed media works, the domestic interior and its immediate surroundings are metaphorical environments built to explore the layers of selfhood and memory.

Carlisle Burch's figurative work balances humor and unease in fragmented narratives that weave together familiar characters and desert memories while exploring tensions between beauty, decay, and illusion.

Alexandria Nazar uses painting, sculpture, and text to explore familial history, reimagining it as a lens for understanding identity, adaptation, and connection.

In this series of oil paintings, Clo unleashes her imagination to reinterpret masterpieces of the 18th century with vibrant colors and dynamic gestures.

By employing saturation and subtle tonal shifts while utilizing imagery stemming from biological systems, Rachel Siminoski’s acrylic paintings depict biomorphic spaces that explore themes of growth and transition.

Hong Yang begins her paintings by mixing oil paints from earth pigments, using the interaction of color as a raft on the sea of becoming - where imagining and seeing are one.

Joanne Boyle’s paintings play with the dichotomy of control and surrender within contemporary paint practices.

Locating themselves through the act of making, the selected work in Permission, Slip culminates the transformative experience of this cohort of ten artists in allowing themselves permission to experiment, to fail, to grow, to make a mark, to build a structure, to make a studio, to impose new tools, to do research, to play with a new material, and above all - to seek.