Elsie Kagan

August 7 - September 27, 2026 | Opening Reception / Meet the Artist: Friday, August 7 / 5 - 8pm

Elsie Kagan's lush, gestural oil paintings begin with her hand but evolve through collaboration with AI. Her layered landscapes are never real places — they explore climate anxiety, cultural upheaval, and the tension between material mark-making and algorithmic processing. Water is a recurring metaphor in her work, reflecting life, reflection, and the cycles of creation and dissolution.

Together alongside Mina Kim's exhibit, Between Lines and Breath, these exhibitions spark conversation about technology, AI, and the enduring value of touch and process — while filling the Gallery with work that is both immersive and thought-provoking. Visitors will move between Elsie’s fluid, AI-informed landscapes and Mina’s tactile, hand-wrought forms, encountering two very different but deeply resonant explorations of contemporary life.

Elsie Kagan collects images from diverse sources—museums, books, and digital media—allowing certain visuals to surface in response to current preoccupations, connecting her practice to multiple languages of art, craft, art history, and the vernacular of color. Her recent focus on landscape emerges from climate anxiety and cultural upheaval, exploring the contradictions of beauty, the limits of perspective, and our mediated relationship with the natural world.

Her landscapes do not depict real places but arise through layered, recursive processes that now incorporate AI models as collaborators. She creates gestural oil paintings informed by direct observation, art historical reference, and a deep interest in color and the material qualities of paint, then photographs these works and feeds them into AI systems. The AI responses inform new work, creating an iterative dialogue where imagery evolves unexpectedly.

Water is both subject and metaphor, considered by the artist for its capacity to be transparent, reflective, life-giving, and destructive. The work explores the tension between material mark-making and spatial illusion, where paint exists simultaneously as surface material and as depth and light. Virginia Woolf’s phrase “the drop falls; another drop forms” from The Waves encapsulates this process of creation and dissolution; the novel’s fluid boundaries of subjective experience recall the porous borders her work investigates between human creativity and machine intelligence. Each painting completes one cycle while generating the conditions for the next: a continuous formation that mirrors both the natural cycles of water and the recursive loops of algorithmic processing.

This exhibition positions her practice within contemporary discussions of the digital sublime, while connecting to landscape painting's complicated history with objectivity and Western notions of Nature. Through sustained attention to material and process, the work suggests that authentic meaning emerges not from attempting to represent truth, but from honest engagement with uncertainty inherent in the creative act.