Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 1:00 PM to Sunday, May 24, 2026 at 1:00 PM
Sabbatikal, Santa Monica
Slow Terrain brings together four California-based painters whose works reconsider the landscape not as scenery, but as a site of encounter. Across their practices, land is neither passive nor infinite. It bends under memory, holds identity, absorbs architecture, and resists permanence.At a moment defined by acceleration of cities, information, climate, and culture, these artists return to the land not to escape modern life, but to reconsider our relationship to it. Their paintings move beyond description. Instead, they suggest that terrain is lived, constructed, remembered, and continually transformed.Eric Dwight Hancock builds his canvases through cycles of addition and subtraction, layering and scraping paint until the surface carries the weight of time. His landscapes hover between abstraction and familiarity, emerging like distant recollections that refuse to fully settle. Light bends and forms dissolve, allowing the viewer to experience place as memory rather than documentation.J. Carino situates monumental queer bodies within luminous wilderness. Drawing on early twentieth-century painting traditions while reimagining their symbolism, Carino replaces narratives of labor and dominion with rest, sensuality, and belonging. His figures lounge among blossoms, branches, and waves, asserting that queerness is not outside the natural world, but inseparable from it.Alex McAdoo turns toward the American suburb, depicting foliage-lined streets and manicured lawns beneath radiant skies. Through warped perspective and the philosophical inclusion of the number zero, a symbol of both nothingness and infinity, McAdoo destabilizes the visual field. Roads and rooftops swirl toward a vanishing point that collapses inward, reflecting on identity, inheritance, and the layered histories embedded within seemingly idyllic landscapes.Paul Paiement travels to remote, uninhabited spaces where sky and earth stretch without boundary. Into these expansive environments, he introduces contemporary architectural forms, geometric structures that stand in deliberate tension with organic terrain. For Paiement, buildings act as metaphors for human presence. The friction between natural vastness and constructed order underscores a broader meditation on environmental change and the inevitability of transformation.Together, these artists resist the myth of endless expansion that has long shaped Western relationships to land. Rather than presenting landscape as something to conquer or consume, Slow Terrain proposes an alternative tempo rooted in attention and reflection. Within MOSS, a contemporary coworking space in Venice designed for productivity and forward motion, the exhibition offers a pause. It invites viewers to linger, to notice, and to consider where the land meets us, not as backdrop, but as something that shapes how we see and who we are.