Open Studio: Cities of Memory
Your guide to spending time with our current exhibition.
Leigh Merrill. Thistle, 2025. archival pigment print on Hahnemühle watercolor paper. 34.5" x 43.5".
Leigh Merrill’s work begins with photographs of various urban and architectural spaces, but the final image is not a direct record of any single location. She removes certain elements, adds others, alters colors, and digitally reconstructs the scene. Through this process, Merrill creates a utopia: a place that feels familiar, as if we may have visited or seen it before, yet exists only within the image itself.
Her cityscapes are clean, quiet, and almost flawless. They are emptied of people, visible technology, and disorder. The air feels clear, and the compositions appear carefully controlled. Her frequent use of orange, blue, and green gives the images a sense of harmony and artificial perfection. Orange and blue, as complementary colors, create a visual balance that supports the work's utopian aura. The beauty of these images is seductive; they present not the city as it is, but the city as it might appear through desire, simulation, and control.
In these images, the human figure exists only through the act of looking. We, as viewers, become the human presence in the work, standing before a physical image of a place that seems to come from the artist’s imagination. In relation to the title Window and Wind, Merrill positions us behind a window, looking into a space shaped by imagination. In this way, the city becomes both external and internal: a constructed landscape and an image of the mind made visible.
Marian Ichaso Lefeld. Home, 2023. Oil on canvas, 48”x 48”.
Marian Ichaso Lefeld’s works also begin with the urban landscape, especially the architecture and city spaces of Caracas, Venezuela. Like Merrill, she looks at the city from the position of an observer. Yet Ichaso Lefeld’s images feel more like traces of memory, distance, and light.
Many of her works are black and white, interrupted by lines or touches of yellow and orange. In this context, orange functions differently than in Merrill’s work. It appears as sunlight, heat, or a passing trace of illumination across the city. The color brings warmth, but also fragility.
Marian Ichaso Lefeld. Pequeña joya moderna, 2026. Collograph relief and blind embossing. 15 x 11 inches, Framed: 20” x 16.5”. A/P
In the white-on-white relief prints, such as Pequeña Joya oderna, the image is barely perceptible at first glance. These quiet surfaces suggest memory and distance: a place that remains present, but only faintly. By referring to Caracas’s midcentury modernist architecture—much of it shaped by oil wealth and now neglected or dilapidated—Ichaso Lefeld creates a trace of memory rather than a fully visible image. Her work turns the city into something both architectural and emotional, connecting urban geometry with absence, recollection, and the layered history of place.
We look forward to seeing you in our space.
Leigh Merrill and Marian Ichaso Lefeld will be on view through July 11th.