CMay Gallery is pleased to present Event Horizon, a group exhibition featuring paintings by Carlson Hatton, Hadley Holliday, Mira Schnedler, and Frank J. Stockton. These four artists resolve to be neither abstract nor figurative, operating along an event horizon in painting. This exhibition explores what is mined from this work zone.

With their lurid brushstrokes and lost figures, these painters make us squint, make us attempt to bring into focus the systems through which we see the world. They see our pasts frozen, as densely pasted stickers on a void. They lull us with familiar faces and painting language birthed from a time when men would strut around with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, die in car accidents and be deemed heroes. But these paintings aren’t here to save us, they’re here to lower a line to spelunk into the void, excavate painting dictions, and forge diverging routes.

Our most recent collective encounter with the void was the delivery of the first image of a black hole. The anticipated image was a crisp Vantablack® Skyspace, surrounded by billions of enthralled stars: a sequel to The Blue Marble. “Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try.”

In actuality, the Event Horizon Telescope image showed us a sleepy red eye gazing back at us in the darkness, more a peephole or a pinhole than a crystal clear abyss. It is an image of uncertainty. But through this image, we are able to untangle the effects of this obscured black hole.

Like the EHT image, the blurred visions in this exhibition draw a multitude of paths and vistas to transcend the binary. They have us gaze into the chasm of the leap of faith to find a common ground, somewhere between science fiction and the fiction of society.