A breathing solitude
Jake Berthot | Hayley Carrow | Megan Greene
Eva Lundsager | Peter Stephens | Rodney Taylor
Exhibition Dates:
March 6 - April 24, 2026
Opening Reception:
Friday, January 16, 2026, 5:00-9:00pm
Rivalry Projects is thrilled to present A Breathing Solitude, a group exhibition that explores how abstraction can embody place and presence. The exhibition includes works by Jake Berthot, Hayley Carrow, Megan Greene, Eva Lundsager, Peter Stephens, and Rodney Taylor, each of whom have ties to Buffalo and the broader Western New York region.
The title of the exhibition is taken from a 2006 essay on Jake Berthot, written by artist and art critic Michael Brennan for the Betty Cunningham Gallery in New York. In speaking to Brennan, Berthot describes how he renders tension in his work, attempting “to paint silence before it completely disappears.” Utilizing oil as a primary medium, his paintings embody an atmospheric stillness within landscape that is both inviting and, at times, ominous.
Like Berthot, explorations of place, light, and time ground the work in the exhibition. Peter Stephens utilizes the structure, and fracture, of the grid to create vibrational planes of interwoven colors that evolve based on the viewer’s perception. Through the layering of ink and colored pencil, Megan Greene creates improvised portals to unseen spaces or conditions. She takes influence from organic forms - horizons, atmosphere, flora, the body - and yet the final compositions are seductive echoes of a setting that doesn’t exist. Similarly, Eva Lundsager creates deep, immersive space through the layering of horizon lines, bold swaths of color, and subterranean-like spaces that suggest a world different from what we know. Leaning into our capacity to assign meaning to what we see, her work carves space for imagination and the fantastic. Hayley Carrow’s paintings evolve through layers of oil, chalk pastel, and acrylic that create translucent overlapping fields of color. Working from memory, she utilizes fluid gesture and a simple palate to render a haze that at times evokes landscape or fleeting atmosphere, while others feel more representational of quotidian moments, objects, or experiences. While he oscillates between representation and abstraction, the work of Rodney Taylor is specific to a place and time. Through his paintings and drawings, often rendered using clay, Taylor examines many topics, that, in this instance, include the dangers of climate change, and the body's relationship to space.
Together, these artists explore how abstraction can summon the experience of being - an embodied presence in space, a geography that is felt rather than described, and a landscape that emerges through gesture, systems, and imagination.
WORKS
Installation ImageS
Coming soon…
About the ArtistS
Jake Berthot (b. 1939 - 2014) was born in Niagara Falls, NY in 1939. He attended the New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute in the early 1960’s. He exhibited regularly in New York since the early 1970’s with the O.K. Harris, the McKee Gallery and currently with the Betty Cuningham Gallery . Berthot was included the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual in 1969 and again in 1973; The Corcoran Biennial in 1975; the Venice Biennale, 1976; New Painting – New York at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1979; American Art: 1950 to the Present at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979; New Works on Paper in 1981 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1984; New York/Beijing, Beijing Art Institute, Beijing, China in 1987; Slow Art: Painting in New York Now, P.S.1, Long Island City, New York in 1992; and Square Painting/Plane Painting at the Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, Washington, 1997. He exhibited regularly in New York since the early 1970’s represented first by the O.K. Harris gallery, the McKee Gallery and currently with the Betty Cuningham Gallery. Additionally, he received several grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1983 and an Academy Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York City. Nationally, his work can be found in the collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, The Rose Art Museum (Brandeis) Waltham, MA The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, the Museum of Art, University of California, Berkeley, CA, among numerous others.
Hayley Carrow (b. 1986) earned a BFA from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, with a focus in painting. Carrow has exhibited her paintings in and around Western New York including shows at Daemen University Amherst, NY, Red Fish Art Gallery East Aurora, NY and Studio Heart Buffalo, NY. She is the recipient of the Emerging Artist Award from the Alfred University painting faculty in 2009, and was an artist in residence at The Barnes Artist Residency (Umbertide, Italy) in 2015. In addition to being a painter Carrow also works as a freelance interior decorator, and owns a boutique that specializes in modern home decor and original art (est. 2010). When she's not at Agatha's, her studio, Carrow can be found designing homes, refurbishing furniture and exploring the world with her family. Hayley Carrow currently lives and works in Buffalo, NY.
Megan Greene (b.1976) is based in Chicago. She studied at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, and the University of Notre Dame. Exhibitions include Regards, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; Kinz Tillou, New York; Katharine Mulherin, Toronto; and Loudhailer, Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Eva Lundsager (b. 1960) evokes deep space and a sense of watchful waiting in her work. Her paintings use multiple horizon lines, atmospheric space, solid, ground-like areas, and they tend to suggest real world space, but a different space from the one we know. She has shown extensively throughout her career with recent solo exhibitions at Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas; Phillip Slein Gallery, St. Louis; Praise Shadows, Boston; Van Doren Waxter, New York; and the Sheldon Art Museum, to name a few. Notable group exhibitions include the Daum Museum; Coral Gables Museum; Whanki Museum, Seoul; Decordova Sculpture Park and Museum; and the ICA Maine, among many others. She is the recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting. Her work resides in the permanent collections of Art in Embassies; Dallas Museum of Art, Deutsche Bank; Harnett Museum of Art; Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School; JP Morgan Chase; MIT List Visual Art Center; Progressive Museum of Contemporary Art; and the St. Louis Art Museum, among others. Eva lives and works in Boston, MA.
Peter Stephens (b. 1958) holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. He has exhibited widely across the US, with exhibitions at Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo, NuArt Gallery, Sante Fe, New Mexico, Zolla/Lieberman, Chicago, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Burchfield Penney Art Center, among many others. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the Castellani Art Museum (Lewiston, NY), the Fenimore Art Museum (Cooperstown, NY), and numerous private collections.
Rodney Taylor (b. 1966 - d. 2019) created somber, yet hopeful, paintings utilizing materials such as acrylic, flashe, pastel, pencil, and clay to channel the frantic energy of our environment and highlight the vulnerabilities of a changing world. Prior to his passing in 2019, Taylor exhibited widely across Western New York, with solo presentations at Nina Freudenheim, Eleven Twenty Projects, UB Art Galleries, and Hallwalls Contemporary Center. Most recently, Taylor was included in Open House: Domestic Thresholds, alongside Heather Hart and Edra Soto, at the Albright Knox Northland. Other Group exhibitions include presentations at Rochester Contemporary Art Center; Empire Fine Arts, Miami; Langston Hughes Cultural Center, Buffalo; The Drawing Center, New York; Kenny Schachter; and the Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, among others. Taylor was a resident at Skowhegan in 1994, and attended FIT, Cooper Union, and matriculated from Bard in 1996. He lived in Buffalo with his wife and four children until his death in 2019.