SARAH BEDFORD
Fangs and Fruits, and Falling Trees
September 2 – November 1, 2025

Mrs. Gallery is pleased to announce Fangs and Fruits, and Falling Trees, a solo exhibition of new works by Sarah Bedford. Created during her year at the Sharpe-Walentas Residency Program, this series sees Bedford merge still life and landscape traditions, taking inspiration from necro pastoral poetry where idealized natural scenes intertwine with themes of decay, transformation, and mystery. Her paintings become layered explorations of memory, ecology, and the natural world’s regenerative cycles.

Bedford’s creative process begins with gouache studies on paper, which she then translates to canvas using loose acrylic washes, layered oil glazes, and oil pastel accents. With a restrained palette of jade greens, sulfur yellows, and earthy carnelian reds and browns, she choreographs plant, rock, and seed forms into twisting, rhythmic movements. Her flowers bend and droop as if alive, forming shifting, self-contained ecosystems. Like pomegranates splitting open or wasps boring through volcanic stone, these works embody time in motion; flux, rupture, and regeneration.

Working with an earthen, mineral-rich palette, Bedford depicts elements like thistles, cocoons, milkweed, and night crawlers, symbols of life unfolding beneath the surface. Her compositions evoke the unseen vitality of the underground, where roots twist with time and emotion, and where endangered species, such as the Ghost Orchid or the lost Sophora Toromiro tree, appear grafted onto vines, carnivorous plants, and fallen fruit. From these juxtapositions, hallucinatory hybrids emerge. Strange, primordial forms suspended between growth and decay, earth and sky, deepening the sense of geologic time across her canvases.

In Wooly Devil, Bedford portrays a newly discovered species from Big Bend National Park, nestled within a glowing yellow cavern. These tiny, furry plants, tucked into dark crevices, hover on the threshold of life like chrysalises about to unfurl. This tension between concealment and release mirrors the emotional currents running through Bedford’s work, where the natural world serves as a site of both grounding and transcendence. Elsewhere, corkscrew Ghost Orchids hover, oversized and moth-like, fluttering through swampy, moss-covered fields.

Deeply connected to nature and plant life, a bond rooted in her upbringing on the wide plains of eastern Montana, Bedford’s floral paintings challenge genre conventions, offering a feminist narrative that emphasizes cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. By incorporating extinct and uncanny flora, she highlights life’s fragility and evokes both remnants of a lost world and the possibilities of unknown futures.
In Fangs and Fruits, and Falling Trees, Bedford transcends a mere reflection of the natural world, instead revealing its interior life; a space where beauty and loss coexist, and where transformation is constant, quiet, and profound. This exhibit will be at 60-40 56th Drive.

KEVIN MCNAMEE-TWEED
Before Lunch
September 4 – November 1, 2025

Mrs. Gallery is pleased to present Before Lunch, an exhibition of new pictorial ceramics by Blue Ridge Mountains–based artist Kevin McNamee-Tweed. The exhibition will be presented in two parts: the first from September 4 – October 4, and the second from October 7 – November 1.

Kevin McNamee-Tweed’s work delves into how meaning is constructed, and stories are conveyed. Though often rooted in the traditions of image-making, painting, and drawing, his practice finds its fullest expression in clay. With an inventive hand and an unrestricted approach to source material, he weaves together influences spanning from the canon of art history to the familiar details of everyday life.

In Before Lunch, McNamee-Tweed presents an array of wall-hanging ceramics that examine themes of self-mythology, the animacy of the natural world, and contemporary expressions of spirituality. Some pieces depict richly detailed interior spaces, where walls are adorned with drawings, notes, and grocery lists, and tables are scattered with books, tools, pots, and artworks. These interiors are simultaneously lived-in and symbolic, serving as intimate repositories for memory, creativity, and the quiet rituals of everyday life.

The artist’s “ceramic paintings” merge the clarity of two-dimensional imagery with the physical presence of sculpture. Rooted in exacting technique yet open to experimentation and chance, these works achieve surfaces, textures, and visual effects possible only through the chemistry and alchemy of the ceramic process. Their modest scale invites close, attentive viewing, fostering a sense of intimacy as the viewer engages with the hand-crafted details and narrative depth, often infused with pathos, humor, and profound curiosity about the world.

In his practice, McNamee-Tweed employs native clays and draws from the rich regional traditions of his North Carolina upbringing. By harmoniously combining time-honored techniques with idiosyncratic processes, he creates works that are as materially compelling as they are narratively layered, intimate in scale, and immersive in detail. This exhibit will be at 60-19 56th Road.