92YTribeca presents the works of Rachel Beach and Nicole Stager – both formerly shown at Like the Spice gallery in Brooklyn – in an opening reception for this semi-permanent exhibit.

Brooklyn-dwelling, Ontario-born Rachel Beach creates works that have been described as “tough, precise and disciplined with a hard edged cheeriness.” Her wall-mounted sculptures – wooden portals and towers – rest on the border “between sculpture and painting, illusion and reality, masculine and feminine, representation, abstraction and decoration.” The portals literally take on the idea of a window, framing a section of wall or empty space in the gallery; the towers are architectural but can also seem at times like freestanding ornament. Each of these sculpture/paintings is designed to alter our visual perception of three-dimensional form.

Nicole Stager creates her work in the darkroom, drawing with handheld light sources in a process that combines the specificity of photography with the aesthetic of abstract painting. Time, color, shape and line are all uniquely presented in Stager’s work; the final product has far more to do with the interaction of light, shadow and chemistry than with the objects that produced them. A native of Pennsylvania, Stager is currently completing her MFA in New Media from the Transart Instituta at Danube University in Krems, Austria.