Gallery Program
Abstract Reasoning: Artwork by Alyson Schultz
April 24 - October 24, 2025
On display at the Second Floor Connector Gallery and Stanley Building Lobby
Art and science both strive to understand the world around us, albeit through different approaches. While artists often explore subjective interpretation and emotional expression, scientists typically employ empirical observation and systematic investigation. Abstract reasoning is an integral component of the creative process and artistic expression. It provides the cognitive flexibility required to move beyond the obvious and the concrete, allowing for the exploration and expression of deeper, multifaceted ideas — recognizing patterns, making connections, and trying to understand complex relationships. It enables us to make leaps in understanding that aren't based solely on what we see.
With a focus on form, color and line, Alyson Schultz's body of work utilizes an expressive visual vocabulary. An attention to the physical immediacy of paint combines with strong, gestural expressiveness to create fragments of an urban reality. Their genesis springboards from site specific imagery, and interprets it in a new context, transforming the source into an artwork that conveys something the raw data may not convey. Each painting undergoes a history of its own, as layers are added, scraped, overpainted, built and rebuilt — the paintings evolve from depiction to a more personal, evocative terrain.
“The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. It's our attempt as humans to build an understanding of the universe, the world around us.”
--Dr. Mae Jemison
Image caption: Ladder, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.
Color and Shape: Works by Sean Flood and Sophy Tuttle
Beginning June 30, 2025
On display throughout the 300 Binney Street Building
Selected works by local artists and are now temporarily on display at 300 Binney Street. Flood and Tuttle were both selected by ӳýies in a survey of the community in 2024, and have generously loaned the work for an extended exhibition for the ӳý Community.
Sean Flood’s work, South Station, The One, and Underground Expressions focus on a rapidly changing urban environment. A painter of the observed, and of real situations, explored on site and finished in his studio, Flood’s paintings are connected to sound, employing marks and gestures that give shape and color to the noises and sensory experiences that surround and define his chosen subjects.
Sophy Tuttle’s Mourning explores the complex relationships we enter into with other creatures and highlights what happens when we let fear guide our decisions. “It has a somber theme,” Tuttle writes, but I hope it is seen as a warning that change is possible and the future can be a better place if we decide to learn from the mistakes of our past.” The Mourning Caracara is famous in ornithological circles for being one of the most stark examples of the complete eradication of another species by humans. Astute observers will note the green thread that weaves through the panels on the first floor, is continued in the sculptural installation on the 3rd.
In addition to the temporary installation, a DNA self-portrait of ӳý’s eighth artist-in-residence, Emilio Vavarella, has joined ӳý’s small permanent collection. 334480b7823d1d71b2bb56bc836d0c74 (The Other Shapes of Me), created in 2025, is the first self-portrait produced by Emilio Vavarella in collaboration with the ӳý. Starting with a sample of DNA extracted from his saliva, Vavarella processed his genetic information using custom software, creating a pixel-perfect tapestry that offers a lasting representation of the meaningful connection between its materiality and the DNA it embodies.
334480b7823d1d71b2bb56bc836d0c74 is part of a cycle of works entitled The Other Shapes of Me, which began in 2020 as a research project on the origin and current applications of binary technology: from weaving to programming, algorithms, software, automation processes, up to the computation of a whole human genome.
