Enchantment

Opening reception for Enchantment, October 25, 2025 at Lockwood Gallery, Kingston New York

 

We are living through a moment when doubt has become our default posture. To be intelligent, we are told, is to suspect; to be contemporary is to remain at a critical distance. Wonder is seen as indulgent and naïve. The spiritual belongs to history, not the present tense.

And yet it seems that story has grown thin. Our vocabulary of cool detachment no longer accommodates everything we are feeling. It was useful for a time, but its edges have hardened into habit. There is a quiet longing underway, a re-leaning toward what feels more porous, expansive, unguarded. One could call this metamodern, but the term matters less than the sensation: a willingness to allow contradiction, to move between knowing and not-knowing, between skepticism and devotion, without demanding resolution.

Enchantment, now at the Lockwood Gallery in Kingston New York, meets that longing with unusual clarity. The work of Deborah Barlow, Alison Cuomo, and Carter Hodgkin does not argue for transcendence. It simply inhabits it. And that difference—between insisting and allowing—changes everything. The exhibition offers art not as a muscular “proof of concept” but more of an invitation to enter into another realm at your own pace.

 

Faloden 2, by Deborah Barlow (mixed media on wood panel, 14 x 14″)

I am very happy about the work that was chosen for this show. My art has been described by some as almost prelinguistic. The paintings do gather slowly: layers of paint, particles and pigments accrete. Then they are scraped, rebuilt, buried, exposed. For anyone encountering them, there is no need to decode anything. Instead, they are made to speak in the elemental language of surfaces that have known time—cosmic time, cellular time, the time of tides and starlings and ash.

It seems that scale tends to “misbehave.” The microscopic and the infinite appear as versions of each other. It is impossible to know if you are looking at something that could fit beneath a fingernail or swallow a whole galaxy. That ambiguity is part of what I want my work to offer. I hope to bring a viewer to an edge: the moment just before comprehension, when perception is still soft enough to be altered.

I am cognizant of the Buddhist teaching that a single mote of dust contains the ten directions. Nothing is illustrated; everything is suggested.

Welkin, by Alison Cuomo (paint on paper, 22 x 30″)

Alison Cuomo’s paintings, by contrast, move with the immediacy of weather. Her brushwork has the fluent ease of someone who has spent years listening—truly listening—to color and form. The natural world is not a motif for her but a collaborator. Her daily practice is less an act of representation than of attunement.

Looking at these works is like walking into a room where someone has just handed you an unnamed flower. Color is the first language spoken; composition follows like breath. There is pleasure here, but it is not decorative. It feels instead like reciprocity: Cuomo receives from nature, and she gives back.

For her, process becomes intimacy. The paintings carry the imprint of a devoted practice—hours spent watching, responding, adjusting, receiving. They feel less like artifacts than like conversations that have been held over many seasons.

While I lean into the elemental, Cuomo draws us toward the sensuous. Awe is experiential rather than contemplative. Her work reminds us that attention itself can be devotional.

Remote 5, by Carter Hodgkin (acrylic paint, inkjet, cut paper and protective varnish on canvas over panel, 40 x 60.”)

Carter Hodgkin’s work appears, at first glance, to belong to another continuum altogether—digital, algorithmic, generative. Yet Hodgkin is no techno-optimist. Her use of code is a way of entering the unseen vectors of the world: the trembling between particles, the vibrating fields that constitute matter long before it takes shape.

Her canvases dither, spark, ripple. The surfaces read as hybrid: part ocean floor, part nebula, part chrysanthemum shattering into light. Chance is invited in; forms evolve as if self-propelling. There is none of the sterility often associated with digital processes. Instead, Hodgkin moves through technology as if through a forest—feeling for its pulse, listening for the invisible rivers flowing beneath.

It is an unexpected kind of mysticism: computational and intimate, coded yet connective. The works hover in a space where physics and feeling are not opposed but aligned, where the smallest particle and the largest field are simply different expressions of the same breath.

 

There is a lineage for the work in this show. It is not New Age revivalism, nor a retreat from thinking. Its kin are Agnes Martin, Hilma af Klint, Etel Adnan, Agnes Pelton, Rilke, Clarice Lispector—thinkers and makers who recognized that reason can take us only so far before we must be carried by another form of intelligence.

The metamodern current is not about rejecting critique; it is about stepping through it. To know the history of doubt, to understand the mechanisms of irony, and to still choose to be permeable—that is the real challenge.

Enchantment in this sense is not spellcraft. It is attentiveness intensified. It is an invitation to notice that the world is not inert, that every surface is secretly trembling, that life is relational all the way down.

The curators, Laura Gurton and Carole Kunstadt, have created an exhibit where this kind of noticing feels natural. Their own practices—Gurton’s biomorphic topographies, Kunstadt’s meditations of paper, memory, and time—hover around the exhibition like quiet satellites. They make no demands. They simply hum.

At a moment when art is often asked to speak in declarative sentences—to solve, expose, indict—Enchantment offers a different proposition: that art can recalibrate our way of being in the world. To stand inside this exhibition is to feel oneself slowing softening. Thought loosens its grip. Attention expands. Something ancient rises to the surface.

Awe is not spectacle here; it is recognition.

We live inside a culture that has forgotten how to listen. Wonder is not a luxury; it is a corrective. The artists gathered at Lockwood are not offering escape from the world but a deeper entry into it. Their works remind us that the boundary between matter and mystery is only an agreement, and a temporary one at that.

To be enchanted is not to believe in magic.It is to acknowledge that not everything can be named.It is to surrender, however briefly, to the knowledge that we are part of a vast and living field, stitched to every particle, every color, every trembling star.

In that sense, enchantment is not a mood but a practice: a way of moving through the world with the understanding that everything is speaking to us.

The only question then is whether we are willing to listen.