Viridian Artists is pleased to announce A WORLD UNTO ITSELF, an affiliate group exhibition featuring the work of SUSAN COSTES, BART DLUHY, KAZUO ISHIKAWA, VERNITA NEMEC, ROBERT T. ROGERS, SUE ROLLINS, and KRISTEN STRUEBING-BEAZLEY. The exhibition will be on view September 8–26, 2026, with an Opening Reception on Thursday, September 10, from 6–8 PM, and a Closing Reception on Saturday, September 26, from 4–6 PM.

A WORLD UNTO ITSELF brings together seven artists whose practices span figuration, abstraction, painting, printmaking, mixed media, and sculptural wall works. Each is immersed in an intuitive and exploratory process, allowing personal experience, observation, memory, material, and chance to shape the work. Together, their practices give rise to distinct visual worlds, each shaped by an individual artistic vision and each a world unto itself, where ideas, experience, and possibility converge.

SUSAN COSTES explores human connection and the quiet narratives of everyday life through paintings that move between realism and abstraction. In this exhibition, Costes presents a series of oil portraits characterized by flattened forms, subtle shifts in tone and color, and washes of paint. Blurred surfaces, matte finishes, and high-contrast textures create a sense of ambiguity, placing the figures between recognition and abstraction. Working intuitively, Costes uses color, texture, and line to look beneath the surface and evoke a sense of intimacy and connection. Her layered process begins with an abstracted, textured underpainting, allowing traces of earlier layers to remain visible as the work develops. Line and the absence of line, transparency and opacity, realism and abstraction coexist, creating a space where image, surface, narrative, and gesture converge.

Process-driven artist BART DLUHY centers his practice on abstraction, combining woodworking and painting through a layered approach to wood surfaces. Using acrylic paint as a foundation, he incorporates other media to alter the paint’s physical qualities and create unexpected results. His process explores the tension between human agency and chance, embracing experimentation and unpredictability. Circles, lines, arcs, contrasting colors, and exposed wood recur throughout his work, while contrasts between dark and light, organic and geometric, delicacy and harshness, and clarity and ambiguity create dynamic opposition. Through an intuitive process, Dluhy balances intention and abandon, emphasizing the serendipitous nature of creation.

KAZUO ISHIKAWA creates abstract mixed-media sculptural wall works that explore the relationship between material, space, and perception. Working with acrylic, polycarbonate, leather, rubber, metal leaf, and other materials, he assembles modular, interlocking geometric forms that move beyond conventional planar structures. Inspired by what he calls “hidden landscapes,” Ishikawa translates the sounds, rhythms, and sensations of nature into imagined spaces defined by points, lines, and planes. Viewed from multiple perspectives, his constructions create complex spatial relationships where geometry and form interact, presenting each work as both an object and an imagined environment.

VERNITA NEMEC’s series "Lost Landscapes" features abstract interpretations of landscapes she calls “Haiku Collages,” a name inspired by their simplicity and diminutive scale. The works evoke imagined vistas that serve as symbols of landscapes already lost, as well as those that may disappear due to humanity’s continued disregard for the environment. Concerned with environmental issues, Nemec has incorporated discarded materials into her art, including junk mail and other forms of trash. She also presents altered digital photographs inspired by Color Field painting, transforming landscape imagery through intensified, non-naturalistic color. These vivid compositions reflect on the beauty, fragility, and evolving reality of the natural world.

The abstract expressionist oil paintings of ROBERT T. ROGERS emphasize mark-making and explore color, shape, and gesture as means of conveying emotion. He works across multiple media, including oil painting, drawing, photography, and text, creating multilayered projects that reflect the complexity of his subject matter. His work connects personal with shared emotional realities. Subconscious painting and intuitive decision-making are central to his process, which often unfolds physically on the floor as he moves around and rotates the canvas. References to religion, particularly Christian ethics, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy appear throughout his work, grounding his practice in spiritual and psychological narratives.

SUE ROLLINS creates metaphorical landscapes that reflect the subconscious, constructing scenes that feel both familiar and disorienting. Shifting perspectives, atmospheric changes, and layered imagery evoke connections between the seen and unseen, memory, and emotion. In her Artifacts of Memory paintings, Rollins incorporates vintage letters and found objects, allowing unexpected political, environmental, or personal narratives to emerge. Lines, whether drawn, painted, or stitched, divide the canvas into quadrants for stories within stories, suggesting the passage of time and changing perspectives. Through layered brushwork, Rollins embraces the process of painting, reworking, and refining as a meditation on impermanence. Her paintings connect the external world she observes with the internal world she experiences.

KRISTEN STRUEBING-BEAZLEY presents seven works from Autumn Orgy: Ancient Greeks at Play, a series of linocuts and monotypes inspired by the black-figure and red-figure imagery of ancient Greek pottery. After discovering playing cards in Athens featuring frolicsome depictions of ancient Greeks in intimate situations, she recognized their connection to motifs found on vessels created for Classical-era symposia. Further research at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford deepened her fascination with these works and their erotic imagery. Her series reinterprets and combines these ancient motifs through a contemporary lens.

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