Rimless Floods, Unfettered Leewardings @ COL Gallery
COL Gallery is pleased to present Rimless Floods, Unfettered Leewardings, curated by Kelly Cahn, on view November 13th, 2026 through January 8th, 2027.
Inspired by the poet Hart Crane's "Voyages," the exhibition brings together a diverse group of painters whose practices operate at the threshold of sensation and form. In 1924 in New York, Crane met Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant seaman, and fell deeply in love. He then faced the challenge of finding language equal to what he felt. The result was his six-part poem, "Voyages." The text dwells on the tumult of intimacy and attempts to work through how to communicate the intangible. The artists in the exhibition similarly explore this notion. They all elude direct articulation of a particular experience or scene. Instead, each draws on the feelings that rise from their own lives and histories, favoring improvisation over literal translation.
For Crane, love was bodily and close to devotional, and he wrote his poem as an act of bearing witness. Nizhonniya Austin (Diné/Tlingit, born in Juneau, AK; based in Albuquerque) makes paintings that grow out of the body and its memories in the same spirit. She paints on the floor so she can move around her canvases, describes the circling movement as a meditative dance, and views her paintings as prayers.
Joe Henry Baker (born in London; based in Brooklyn) also keeps the canvas in motion, letting water do much of the work. Working in watercolor, dye, and bleach, often in a single sitting, he lets each piece take shape as the water evaporates, shifting the canvas’s orientation throughout the process to steer the materials without ever fully controlling them. The resulting surfaces are at once ethereal and raw.
"Voyages" is also a poem of instability, in which the self is unmoored, exhilarated, and frightened all at once. Heide Fasnacht (born in Cleveland; based in New York), who has spent decades on sudden, unstable phenomena such as explosions and eruptions, paints from that unsettled place. In Xcelerator and Animal Modernities, she interweaves altered photographs with juicy paint, capturing the vertigo of bodies in motion and landscapes that toggle between the real and the unreal.
Dana James (born in New York; based in Brooklyn) also works from that tension. Her paintings are charged with opposing forces: large fields of airy pastel on weathered, recycled canvas are offset by flurries of marks she likens to scars on otherwise flawless skin. Dark, explosive pigments are held in layers of muted wax, while traces of iridescence catch the light like the glinting of the ocean.
Crane's metaphor of love as the sea, something that both carries and dissolves, finds a counterpart in the paintings of Landon Metz (born in Phoenix; based in New York), who lets gravity guide the flow of his materials. Long known for abstraction, he has recently turned to the body, soaking thin washes of dye into unprimed canvas so that figures and contours seem to merge, drift, and sink into the raw weave.
For Carrie Rudd (born in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY; based in Brooklyn), the canvas is a place where feeling is not illustrated but re-lived. She builds layered, tactile oil surfaces with frenetic marks that blur abstraction and narrative, and fragments of text and half-recognizable references surface among the gestures. She has described painting as reviving lived experiences and drawing them back to the surface, without ranking any experience above another.
Crane’s sea is also rimless, a place where memory and sensation wash into one another without clear edges. The recent work of Corrie Slawson (born and based in Cleveland Heights, OH) moves through that same simultaneity. Made in response to being in Assisi, Italy on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, her paintings build collage, drawing, and paint into dense, swirling fields that, like a mandala, ask the eye to slow down and settle.
Mamie Tinkler (born in Memphis; based in New York) has spent more than fifteen years making small, meticulously observed watercolor still lifes of everyday objects such as dishware, drapery, and keepsakes. She stages and photographs her arrangements with mirrors and theatrical lighting, then lets the unpredictability of watercolor do the rest. Under her sustained attention, ordinary things become charged, slightly uncanny, and strangely alive.
Crane wrote "Voyages" to give lasting form to a love he could not fully put into words. The artists in Rimless Floods, Unfettered Leewardings take up that same task in paint. Through the body, through instability, through mediums and through close attention to the everyday, each finds a way to hold what is felt but cannot be fixed.