Clingy, thick-hot summer air followed me into Uffner & Liu gallery on a recent Friday afternoon. But as soon as I reached the top of the gallery’s stairs, I found myself pulled into a more temperate realm. Standing on the top step, peering through a steel grid covering Isabel Horgan’s egg-tempera painting “Mirage” (all works 2026) like the mesh of a fence, my eyes traced a light-dappled path into a verdant forest clearing. A lone figure clad in a spotless white gown appears to be digging, searching for something unseen. This enigmatic, fairytale-esque scene could have been plucked from any number of historical eras, were it not for the gas pipes poking up in the foreground. So begins Marooned.
The exhibition brings together 17 artworks by the 11 artists who comprise the Rhode Island School of Design’s 2026 Master of Fine Arts in Painting program cohort: Lloyd-Princeton Cangé, Callie Coccia, Siran Liu, Kati Lowe, Lucy Luckovich, Banshee Maria, Shiyeon Monk, Pavol Roskovensky, Talha Shams, and Ricky Vasan, as well as the aforementioned Horgan. Though this group represents a breadth of interests and aesthetic sensibilities, from airy, tactile abstractions to glossy, unsettling realism, curator Ajay Kurian unearthed enough throughlines in the selected works to knot together a visually and emotionally resonant net.
Left: detail of Lloyd-Princeton Cangé, “Into the Hinterland” (2026), oil and ink on canvas and linen, ink on paper, hardboard, wood, aluminum foil tape, airbrush on wall; right: Ricky Vasan, “Teach me How to Write a Love Song” (2026), oil on canvas
Ringing the skylit room and extending onto the wood floor, the pieces share subtle points of connection and seem to converse with one another, their echoing colors, shapes, and ideas pinging around the room. The flock of hot-pink forms in Liu’s atmospheric abstract work “Horizon Patience,” for instance, echoes the curves of a lone hanger dangling in the aching, intimate domestic scene in a neighboring oil painting by Vasan, titled “Teach Me How to Write a Love Song.” In it, a woman in white, having a quiet moment, is reflected in a patch of bathroom mirror.
Meanwhile, with its bamboo stakes and red ropes that extend beyond the canvas, the ember red of Shams’s “ بندھن (Bandhan)” glows back across the room, layering into the smoky reds and titular maroons of Liu’s canvas. These gloaming hues also float through Lowe’s radiant ocular skyscape, “Cloud Interrupted,” and edge the fallen furniture in her grief-stricken diptych, “When the Chair Fell Silent.”
Next to “ بندھن (Bandhan),” another pair of paintings shares a mixed-media sensibility, with imagery and objects that also spill onto the gallery’s white walls. A thorny tangle of steel branches, a small crocheted square of mossy mohair, a poem, and a frame encasing a grid of dandelion seeds that bring to mind wispy hairs or wishes compose Horgan’s poetic, layered material exploration, “wooosssssssssp (softly).”
To its left, Cangé’s “Into the Hinterland” spans two paintings on stretched canvas and linen. It consists of a silhouetted portrait and a cluster of patterned leaves, as well as a scythe sculpture and a forest scene airbrushed on the wall, depicting a blood-red human figure fighting off a trio of what appear to be wild dogs or wolves. Below, an airbrushed clump of uprooted flowers seems to tumble toward the floor, serving as a poignant symbol of blooming in the face of upheaval. Excerpted from the artist’s MFA thesis, The Maroon Cycle: Overture, this piece digs into the history of enslaved Africans, known as Maroons, who escaped into remote environs — and it anchors the exhibition in both title and concept.
One of the pleasures of visiting grad shows is the sense of discovery — of encountering up-and-coming artists, noticing what matters to a given cohort, and seeing how they’re each responding to the moment through their chosen medium. These painters make art despite the relentless chaos, rupture, and heartbreak swarming headlines and daily life, or because of it. In Marooned, each painting is like an island awash with a sense of yearning and desire and seeking, sending out a lighthouse signal into a fractured world.
Details of works by Kati Lowe
Marooned continues at Uffner & Liu (170 Suffolk Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through August 28. The exhibition was curated by Ajay Kurian.
