One of the hardest things about landscape painting is trying to encapsulate, in the relatively small rectangle of a picture plane, something that’s active, alive and constantly shifting. In “Signals,” on view through June 21 at K. Grant Fine Art in Vergennes, six artists address those weirder, subtler aspects of attempting to represent the natural world. In some ways, the show has taken on a meta narrative: It will be the last one in the charming former carriage house, which means the gallery’s landscape is also changing.
Kristen Grant, who started her gallery and art consulting business in the little house on Green Street last August, said she has decided to leave the building, which has subsequently been put up for sale. While she had hoped to stay for more than a year, Grant, 33, said she is seeking a new space, possibly in an area with more foot traffic and a greater number of galleries. Despite good attendance at her opening receptions, she said, “It would be great to be in a community where I’m not the only art space.”
The show addresses landscape not in terms of how nature looks but how we understand it and what it’s trying to say.
Lonely though the gallery may be, Grant has packed a vibrant conversation into it for “Signals,” which includes works by six northeast artists. The show addresses landscape not in terms of how nature looks but how we understand it and what it’s trying to say.
Steve Budington explores the topic through three large paintings and one drawing in the show. Budington teaches painting at the University of Vermont and is also a landscape designer. That combination may be why his paintings so effectively layer different ways of thinking about and representing the natural world.
“Stop, I want to communicate with you (signal flag and forest),” for instance, stacks two canvases with parts from a painted frame. One canvas includes a maritime signal flag, a recurring motif in his work, whose actual meaning is the first part of the title. Over it, little trees sprout across a blank canvas like symbols on a map; some are fluorescent orange, as though on fire.
That color is taken up by Grace Hager in a ceramic sculpture on a nearby pedestal, depicting an almost-cartoonish campfire. Hager has striped the logs with a shiny gold luster glaze, while the flames themselves are matte shades of orange and yellow, sprouting from the logs like strange growths. She uses texture to make a common, comforting scene more alien and a little wild.
Similar techniques are at play in separate paintings by David Kearns and JoAnne Lobotsky. Grant said Kearns works on his paintings for an agonizingly long time: A few on view were started in 2011 and finished in 2025. That really shows in “Landscape Painting,” a diminutive 6.5-by-8.5-inch painting on a canvas framed by a discarded cardboard tray. Kearns has built up the surface with paint and glossy resin, seemingly scraping old paint onto a ledge at the base of the canvas. The result is a sense of time, an accumulation of observation that’s more important than the scene itself.
Where Kearns’ surfaces read like bumpy, weathered glass, Lobotsky’s look almost like vibrant cement. Grant said the artist mixes paint with molding paste, sand and dirt to give it an earthy, substantial texture. Works such as “Shelter” and “Winter Forest” balance that with artificial-frosting colors — sherbet orange, chartreuse, heliotrope — to create scenes that are at once joyfully childlike and deeply troubling.
Aimée Papazian‘s installation “Which End Is Up? II” offers a clean, spare counterpoint to the texture-heavy works. White, topographic layers of plywood support tiny porcelain trees, houses, cars and birds, each one mounted on a wire and punched into the wall like a map pin. Papazian shifts perspective often; cars driving across a shelflike protrusion turn 90 degrees to travel up the wall, and an aerial view flips upside down where trees grow out of the ceiling. The artist uses real space to destabilize the illusion that the natural world can be mapped and modeled.
While all the artists in the show interrogate humans’ relationships with nature to one extent or another, Jennifer McCandless actually fosters those relationships. Her contributions to the show are not the colorful character sculptures for which she’s well known but outdoor sculptures in which non-stinging pollinators can nest or seek shelter. The sculptures have holes in them sized to restrict which species will use the habitats. McCandless fires her clay to a specific temperature that will ward off wasps and fungus, Grant said. “She wants to start making outdoor sculpture that’s not just taking up space — it’s actually offering space,” she added.
Grant has also placed 26 of McCandless’ “puddlers” in the gallery’s back garden. They are tiny dishes that collect water, complete with perches for beneficial insects, and are shallow enough not to attract mosquitoes. They are well camouflaged among newly sprouting ferns and ground covers, tying the show back to actual nature.
Part of the inspiration for “Signals” was Grant’s time in high school at the Willowell Foundation’s Walden Project in nearby Monkton, an outdoor learning program where students study Henry David Thoreau while out in the woods. Grant said it was a formative experience and one of the ways growing up in the area has shaped how she thinks about landscape.
That’s apparent in the show, where each piece seems reflected in the next. It will be exciting to see how K. Grant Fine Art re-creates that dynamic in a new location, hopefully with more room for larger works. Grant hopes to find another home for her gallery in the coming months.
Reflecting on her time in Vergennes, she said, “It’s been really fun to use this space and to bring people together. It’s been an amazing year.”
Correction, May 29, 2025: This article was updated to reflect that 37 Green Street was put up for sale following Kristen Grant’s decision not to renew her lease.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Mixed ‘Signals’ | A strong show at K. Grant Fine Art is its last in Vergennes”
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2025.
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