Material Instinct: Group exhibition

Square One Gallery is pleased to present “Material Instinct,” a group exhibition featuring Dylan Martinez, Carrie Gillen, Eric Moore, Hayley Sheldon, Cameron Richter, and Alexandra Squire. Bringing together painting, sculpture, glass, textiles, carved surfaces, woven elements, and light, the exhibition considers what happens when an artist’s ideas encounter the physical behavior of a material. “Material Instinct” opens October 23 and remains on view through December 4.

Throughout the exhibition, each artist allows the physical qualities of their chosen medium to guide the work’s development. Glass refracts and distorts. Fabric stretches and gathers. Woven surfaces filter light. Carved forms build depth through repetition. Paint shifts through color, line, and atmosphere. These qualities are not secondary to the finished works. Weight, tension, transparency, texture, and resistance actively shape how each composition develops.

Across the exhibition, these different approaches create a visual exchange of density and openness, precision and irregularity, restraint and abundance. Transparent glass and illuminated color draw light into the work, while carved reliefs, gathered fabric, and woven grids emphasize surface and depth. Repeated motifs bring rhythm to the gallery, while quieter expanses of color create moments of pause. Each work maintains its own distinct presence, yet changes as it is viewed alongside objects made through entirely different methods.

Here, instinct is not the opposite of intention. It is the fluency that develops through sustained familiarity with a medium: knowing when to direct it, when to respond, and when to allow its natural properties to lead. Viewed together, the works reveal six distinct ways of thinking through making. Each begins with a different set of materials but arrives at something that could not have been fully determined in advance.