Thresholds: Part I

Lily Alice Baker | Colleen Herman | Lee Maxey | Katarina Riesing | Pauline Shaw

Presented in Collaboration with NARANJO 141

February 27 — April 13, 2025

Mexico City: NARANJO 141

VIEW WORKS

Olympia is pleased to present Thresholds: Part I, the first iteration of a two-part exhibition jointly held with NARANJO 141 (Mexico City), bringing together works by Lily Alice Baker, Colleen Herman, Lee Maxey, Katarina Riesing, and Pauline Shaw. Thresholds: Part I opens in Mexico City on February 27, 2025, followed by Thresholds: Part II in New York on April 3, 2025.

Thresholds brings together five artists who explore the liminal spaces we navigate in our daily, familial, spiritual, and creative lives. Some depict figures and environments in moments of transformation, while others embrace the transcending qualities of uncertainty. Through oil on canvas, egg tempera on panel, dye on intimately woven textiles, and graphite on paper, the exhibition centers a commonality of pushing boundaries within chosen mediums to deepen our understanding of self and surroundings.

Lee Maxey’s dramatically cropped paintings capture the paranoia and transformative potential of everyday objects and portals, leaving us in suspense—unable to unbolt the latch, tip the domino, or turn the knob frozen within the picture plane. Katarina Riesing’s embroidered silk works meditate on the unease between body and garment, revealing imperfections that complicate idealized notions of adornment. In Pauline Shaw’s dyed felt compositions, textile patterns, scientific imagery, and organic forms converge, gesturing toward a new vernacular. Lily Alice Baker’s paintings offer glimpses of queer joy poised to break through the patriarchal confines of the barroom, while in Colleen Herman’s abstract works, gestural brushstrokes verge on summoning ethereal portals.

Though each artist’s visual language is distinctly their own, Thresholds brings us to conceptual, pictorial, and painterly edges where discomfort becomes a site of resonance.

LILY ALICE BAKER

Drawing on both Abstract Expressionism and figurative painting, Lily Alice Baker’s (b.1998) work explores her own identity in a world catered to masculinity. Naturally inclined to push herself outside her boundaries, Baker navigates spaces that are not traditionally a safe haven for female and queer people and, with a keen eye for body language, renders the revealing ways in which gender is performed. The glowing anthropomorphic figures that emerge from Baker’s seedy dreamscapes hint at the possibility of a public arena where fluid notions of gender might thrive. 

COLLEEN HERMAN

Colleen Herman’s (b.1982) practice is rooted in a ritualistic approach to the creative process: The color, texture, and rhythm of her surroundings are absorbed into a studio space that becomes a realm for experimentation. Herman’s appetite for discovery often extends off the canvas onto the studio walls themselves, where a vernacular that is singularly rooted in the organic begins to emerge: Her intuitive command of color, sensitivity to natural life, and respect for the legacy of Abstract Expressionism fuse to create jubilant, lyrical works that thrum with improvisational energy.

LEE MAXEY

Paranoia, dogma, and apocalyptic anxiety loomed large over Lee Maxey’s (b.1988) childhood in a devout religious household. Maxey constructs tightly-cropped vignettes that locate the structure, anticipation and gamesmanship of organized religion in commonplace scenarios. Working in egg tempera, a medium favored by medieval and pre-renaissance religious painters, Maxey raises banal objects of everyday incidence to reverential heights. The impulse to move a piece, turn a knob, or unbolt a lock is provoked and frustrated by the static claustrophobia of each frame, forcing the viewer to confront the small covenants that reign over daily life.

KATARINA RIESING

Employing rich dyes and embroidery, Katarina Riesing (b.1982) subverts the delicacy of silk with depictions of the human body. Using herself or those closest to her as her subjects, Riesing meditates on the relationship between the body and the garments that adorn it. Working on a handheld hoop, Riesing maintains a close proximity to every square inch of the silk throughout the process of embroidery, infusing each figurative form with an attention to textural abstraction. The finished pieces complicate idealized notions of her chosen medium while refusing to cede the artist’s penchant for pure formal experimentation.

PAULINE SHAW

Pauline Shaw (b.1988) laces together shared histories, personal experiences, and belief systems into large-scale textiles and installations that speak to experience and perception. Shaw’s felted landscapes draw from the structured processes of lace-making, wet-felting, and needle-felting to evoke the uncertainty of memory and the mysteries of our belief systems. Through the processes of collage and abstraction, she splices and renders each as recordings of forms that are lost, obscured, and only partially remembered. The final suspended felted panes contend with each of these questions, tracing the path of degeneration, and the fallibility of our modes of preservation, across our cultures, our lineages, and our identities at-large.