It is often said that the brightest stars are not stars at all, but planets. In this exhibition we present 10 rising stars whose bright light and way-out orbit challenge easy categorization.

The paintings of HILARY DOYLE make a world most fluid where there is much fact and little friction … but wait! ... we can hear that little rhyme that kids say as they pull the petals off a daisy one by one. There stirs here in its early days a new imagined world never before seen and a new way to paint it. We see before us -Trompe Doyle!

Characteristic of the most recent paintings of ANTHONY GIANNINI is a great press forward like the surge of a crowd toward the stage. The noise and the urgency are inescapable. These works can be maverick or can define forward-looking for us all – or do both.

RACHEL KLINGHOFFER paintings like the flying buttresses outside the walls of the Temple of Earthly Delights create a space for elegance and lift. As they serve the beauty inside and can themselves be frightening, these paintings separate blossom from bloom, bosom from boom.

Between the territory of Outside-looking-in and Inside-looking-out FRANCISCO MORENO travels so easily as to be more or less borderless. An observer whose strategic acquiescence and stubborn resistance crossover in collaborative self-definition…significantly Francisco collaborates with Moreno.

The only paintings that could lower sea levels and restore the polar ice caps are here in the work of KIMO NELSON. Not because of ‘cool’ though they bring that, but because they are a most hopeful map of possibilities. Nelson is a chaos-tician studying complex systems.

Vexingly chimerical, but wonderfully alchemical, one could say that ART PEÑA’s paintings have an Ionic soul in a Doric body. Like fulgurites (ZAP!) he presents mysterious compounds from outer space made of familiar elements in unknown proportions.

Familiar elements in unknown proportions propel LAUREN MICHELLE RAWLINGS protean and quixotic adventures in self-portraiture. Subject and object switch roles back and forth in self or any portraiture making them necessarily motion pictures. So it is with Rawlings’ mercurial installation.

Our Bard said the Land of Milk and Honey has become the land of money. PAGE WHITMORE sees this as an historian of the Future and her paintings move from the quotidian to an imagined world ahead where deception is employed with both humor and critical consequence.

BRUCE WILHELM can be called a Master of Disguise, but only if properly seen as all “Master”, much “guise”, and no “Dis”. His studio is a research lab producing more tower than tunnel. That is, we don’t dig deep in critique, we build up high for vista.

Channeling and funneling light ASTRID TOHA works with light’s leaking fluidity to create a kind of visual glissando in her resplendent prints and projections … And … Yes, dear, you will be in her headlights!

- Dennis Congdon