Anna Conway’s six paintings on view depict fragments from unfolding narratives in which ordinary people are suddenly confronted by forces much greater than themselves, either due to circumstances beyond their control or because of an unexpected momentary suspension of disbelief. The paintings are windows onto brief moments of radical experience that take place on the job, while killing time, in transit—wherever we least expect them. A man assigned the task of collecting obsolete aerial antennas from a vast big-box store rooftop loses himself in a contemplative trance. A third-shift janitor tries out a push-up on a junior partner’s desk. A kid sweeping up an outdoor food court has his life jeopardized by a badly-mounted inflatable advertisement. The ambiguity the viewer senses in these narratives derives from our inability to know the internal nature of the subjects’ epiphanies. We witness spontaneous disruptions in ordinary days without being privy to the exact nature of either their causes or their effects. Often, these are the quiet moments that change lives, the ones we are tempted to try to express before coming to the slightly embarrassed conclusion that they are indescribable in their simple profundity: “How was work?” “Well, I… it was… not… the usual.”

Conway is concerned with the emotional, poetic moment (usually stereotyped as feminine) in the heroic-pathetic lives of our underemployed sad dads, our wannabe thuggy little brothers, guys working construction—the people (most of them men) who aren’t supposed to have access to fear or beauty or melancholy or much else beyond whatever the job requires. She places her protagonists, often alone, sometimes in pairs, in settings that are familiar but sit just slightly outside of the everyday. The paintings are meticulously imagined and rendered using traditional oil painting techniques. The scenes are invented from scratch and as a result the paintings have a sense of everything being equally clearly defined and in focus. Stylistically, Conway brings the stilted formality and patterning of early American folk painting into dialogue with Renaissance composition and the drama of the Hudson River school, seamlessly evoking everything from Rufus Porter to Vermeer to Edward Hicks to Rousseau to Martin Johnson Heade. The palpable role of time and labor spent in the production of the paintings echoes the relationship of work and routine to transcendence that is presented in the narratives.