Thresholds: Part II

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

Presented in Collaboration with NARANJO 141

April 3 — May 3, 2025

New York City: 41 Orchard Street

VIEW WORKS

Olympia is pleased to present Thresholds: Part II, the second 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 opened 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. Figures in the midst of vulnerability or machismo are recalled by their most telling characteristic— a slumped shoulder, a raised brow— and then blended together with bold painterly gestures that defy the hermetically sealed notion of the female body. 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.

Baker received her Foundation Diploma in Fine Art at Sussex Coast College, Hastings, UK (2018), and subsequently received her BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London, UK (2021). She has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at COL Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2023); Young Soy Gallery, Zurich, CH (2023); NARANJO 141 (with Bayo Alvaro), Mexico City, MX (2023); Flatland Projects, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK (2022); and The Bottle Factory, Peckham, UK (2022). Baker currently lives and works in London, UK.

COLLEEN HERMAN

Colleen Herman (b. 1982, Baltimore, MD) is an artist who creates polychromatic multimedia works on natural surfaces. She received her BFA from Syracuse University in 2004. Her practice is grounded in a ritualistic approach to the creative process, where the color, texture, and rhythm of her surroundings are absorbed into her studio space—a realm for continuous experimentation. 

Herman’s drive for discovery often extends beyond the canvas, onto the studio walls themselves, where a distinctive visual language rooted in the organic takes shape. With an intuitive command of color, a sensitivity to the natural world, and a deep respect for the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, Herman’s work is a fusion of joy and lyricism. Her compositions pulse with improvisational energy, blending bold painterly gestures with the delicate traces of flora that often unfurl across the canvas. The life cycle, in all its forms, runs through her work, reflecting an ongoing evolution that mirrors the human experience.

Recent solo exhibitions include Sarah Brook Gallery (Los Angeles, CA, 2021-2025), Olympia (New York, NY, 2023), and Mary MacGill Gallery (Germantown, NY, 2022). She has also participated in group exhibitions at Loyal (Los Angeles, CA, 2025), NARANJO 141 (Mexico City, Mexico, 2025), Eric Firestone (East Hampton, NY, 2024), The Hole (Los Angeles, CA, 2023), Zurcher Gallery (New York, NY, 2022), Lovaas Projects (Munich, Germany, 2020), and La Señora Gallery (Oaxaca, Mexico, 2020). The Salon by NADA x The Community (Presented by Olympia, Paris, France, 2024) marked her debut exhibition in Paris.

LEE MAXEY

Paranoia, dogma, and apocalyptic anxiety loomed large over Lee Maxey’s (b.1988) childhood in a devout religious household. Now, as an artist working out of Brooklyn, New York, 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: Bolt-locks or door hinges, sets of pickup-sticks or dominoes are rendered in a monumental isolation that lends an inescapable authority to each subject. 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.

Maxey received her BFA from the University of Central Arkansas, AR (2011), and subsequently received her MFA from Boston University, Boston, MA (2016). She has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Gallery 12.26, Dallas, TX (2025 & 2023); Olympia, New York (2024 & 2021), Yutaka Kikutake Gallery (with Yang Bo), Tokyo, JP (2023); and Hercules, New York, NY (2019). Her work resides in the public collection of the Rare Books Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston, MA. Maxey currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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: Floral lace patterns mingle with pocked, pimpled, and hairy skin, woodgrains rhyme with the flesh’s topography, and shrouds of stripes form barriers between the viewer and the secondary sexual characteristic of the body. 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.

Riesing received her MFA in 2009 and her MA in 2008 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, and prior received her BA in Fine Art and Anthropology from Smith College, Northampton, MA (2005). She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York, NY (2023 & 2020); Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY (2022); Downtown Gallery, Madison, WI (2017); Seligmann Center for the Arts, Chester, NY (2015); and SOHO20 Gallery, New York, NY (2010). She has been invited to residencies most recently at NARANJO 141, Mexico City, MX (2024); Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Deer Isle, ME (2021); Cite International des Arts, Paris, FR (2018); and Saltonstall Artist, Ithaca, NY (2017). Riesing currently lives and works in Tucson, AZ.

PAULINE SHAW

Through a diverse set of labor-intensive techniques, 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: Western-drawn borders, MRI scans, and ancestral weave patterns are overlaid with loose threaded gestures that evoke the unseen, the unconscious, the automatic. Each of the processes and materials that Shaw employs is embedded with complex legacies and tenuous relationships. 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.

Shaw received her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2011), and subsequently received her MFA at Columbia University, School of Arts, New York, NY (2019). Recent institutional recognition includes work selected for Under the Talking Tree, Kunsthal n, Copenhagen, DK (2025); Tender Loving Care, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA (2023); Draw, the Frost Museum, Miami, FL (2023); and a mural commissioned by the Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2023). She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at NARANJO 141, Mexico City, MX (2024); Chapter NY (with Antonia Kuo), New York, NY (2023); In Lieu, Los Angeles, CA (2021); and Rhabbitat, Los Angeles, CA (2016). Shaw currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.