Through the Looking-Glass

December 6, 2025 - January 10, 2026

Through the Looking-Glass features the work of five distinctive artists—Daniel Carrillo, Michael Doyle, Christian French, Gail Spaien, and Cappy Thompson. The exhibition includes artworks rendered in various mediums from painting to photography to engraved glass that reflect how we perceive ourselves in relationship to the cycles of nature, time, and the cosmos through everyday instances and commonplace objects. While the artworks may appear quite different from a cursory glance given their varied aesthetic concerns and methods, closer attention reveals how they share a sense of luminosity and mystery regarding not only what we see, but how we see it.

The exhibition features new work by Maine-based painter Gail Spaien and Seattle-based artists Cappy Thompson and Michael Doyle. In Spaien's carefully composed paintings, domestic scenes are transformed into dazzling mosaics of color, light, and pattern. Works such as Falling Eventide and Nightfall (2025) interweave tranquil interiors with the changing expanses just outside the window. This interplay of the intimate and the monumental is also reflected in Cappy Thompson's luminously engraved glass vessels, which include personal and mythological scenes cast within flattened jewel-toned forms. The sense of wonder and mystery evident in Thompson's sparkling engravings and Spaien's domestic scenes are further refracted in Michael Doyle's paintings. In them, Doyle depicts how various kinds of encounters—like spotting an owl —are mediated by different devices that reflect a search for guidance, self-knowledge, and new perspectives.

Also included in the exhibition are photographic works by Seattle-based artists Christian French and Daniel Carrillo. French's photographs document the interplay of light within carefully arranged assortments of objects the artists sourced locally while attending a residency in the Netherlands in 2008. Reflective of the geographic setting in which they were made, these photographs nod toward the still life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, while also representing certain experiences and people French encountered during his time in the Netherlands. This dual reference to people vis-à-vis objects and earlier artistic traditions is evident in Daniel Carrillo's photographs as well. A master of various antique photography techniques, here, Carrillo uses the labor-intensive daguerreotype process—one of the earliest photographic processes, popular during the mid-nineteenth century—to transform images of commonplace items into treasured portraits. Works like John Radtke’s Portable Studio and Kimberly Trowbridge’s Palette (2017) immortalize utilitarian objects into representations of each’s artist’s practice. 

Taken together, the artworks in Through the Looking-Glass reveal how a room with a view or a collection of objects can accumulate meaning as a means of understanding ourselves and the world around us. Beyond their thematic resonances and reflective qualities, the artworks in Through the Looking-Glass are further united by the high level of craftsmanship employed by their creators. Through their varied antique and contemporary methods of image making, these artists capture how small moments and objects are deeply intertwined with life’s larger forces and concerns.


-David Strand



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