Collective Gestures

Small works, large meaning: art as conversation.

Mark Rengers Gallery, November 1 – December 31, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1, 6–8 PM
Holiday Party: Friday, December 5, 6–9 PM (During Sewickley’s, annual Light Up Night)

In the weeks before winter, when days contract and light softens, small gestures take on new meaning. A shared glance, a hand on a shoulder, a letter written instead of texted—all reminders that connection rarely depends on grandeur. It’s built in the quiet, the particular, the small.

Collective Gestures brings together a group of artists working in smaller formats—paintings, drawings, glass, and sculpture that invite closeness. On the surface, it’s a gathering of works perfectly timed for the holidays: intimate, approachable, meant to be lived with. But beneath that, the exhibition explores something deeper—the idea that art itself is a gesture of communication.

Every mark, every texture, every pause of color is a sentence in the language between artist and viewer. The painter’s brushstroke is a kind of confession; the sculptor’s curve, an extension of thought. When artists work small, there’s nowhere to hide—each choice becomes precise, personal, deliberate. These gestures accumulate—across canvases, across artists, across time—into a collective conversation about what it means to reach out and be seen.

It’s tempting to think communication is something we master through explanation. Yet often, as in art, it’s what remains unsaid that carries the truth. The spaces between words, the pauses in tone, the silences in paint—these are where understanding begins.

In relationships, as in creative work, missteps often come not from what’s spoken, but from what’s left unexpressed. Expectations, assumptions, quiet needs—all the little things that, unattended, grow larger in the dark. Imagine if we approached each other with the same openness that artists bring to a blank surface—willing to be vulnerable, to make small marks honestly, to adjust, to listen.

Collective Gestures is not just an exhibition. It’s an invitation to notice the power of the understated—to see how the smallest creative act can become a bridge. Art, at its most human, is communication without pretense: a collection of gestures that reach, together, toward understanding.

Casey Haugh – The Space Between Worlds

In the paintings of Casey Haugh, light and form become a meditation on distance—between the known and the unknown, the tangible and the infinite. His Void Series draws viewers into that liminal space, where still-life objects rest on a black plane that feels both table and cosmos.

Using a meticulous oil-glazing technique, Haugh gives each object its own internal radiance. The surfaces seem to breathe, glowing softly against the darkness that surrounds them. Yet beyond their beauty, these objects speak—symbols of Earth and humanity suspended in a field of silence.

In his work, the void is not absence but potential, the quiet that allows meaning to emerge. Haugh reminds us that even in vastness, connection persists. Every small, luminous form—a vessel, a fruit, a glint of reflection—becomes a gesture of belonging, a reminder that we too inhabit the same cosmic still-life, held in the same expanse of unknowable space.

Chris Ross – The Language of Light and Color

For glass artist Chris Ross, communication begins in the meeting of color and form. Working with molten glass, Ross translates motion into matter—each vessel a physical record of breath, spin, and timing. His process is one of conversation: between heat and gravity, intuition and control.

Color, for Ross, is not decoration but dialogue. As molten glass expands and cools, hues split and fuse, responding to the natural physics of the material. In this way, his works become meditations on how communication happens—fluidly, unpredictably, through forces that can be guided but never fully mastered.

A Pittsburgh native who first studied glass as a teenager, Ross channels years of craft into moments of luminous simplicity. Each piece captures that elusive instant when gesture becomes form, and form becomes message—a testament to how beauty can emerge from attention, patience, and trust in process.

A Chorus of Gestures

From Haugh’s meditative cosmos to Ross’s luminous vessels, the exhibition extends outward—into a wider field of voices, each artist contributing their own way of speaking through material. Together, they form a chorus of gestures, unified by the impulse to connect.

Margot Dermody brings an elemental sensitivity to her paintings and glass sculptures, merging natural textures with emotion; her shifting palettes move between calm restraint and vivid storytelling.
Kristin Divers, working in pastel, builds color directly with her hands, her tactile layers carrying both immediacy and intimacy—the very feel of thought taking shape.
Todd Double turns engineering into poetry, creating kinetic sculptures that hum, turn, and breathe, reminding viewers that play, and curiosity are forms of conversation too.
Lisa Marie Jakab paints and draws with a sense of geological movement, her saturated fields and organic marks exploring the tension between chaos and control, spontaneity and structure.
Patrick Lee blurs the boundary between observation and imagination; his paintings suggest places remembered more than seen, encouraging viewers to finish the thought.
Melody Lockerman works fluidly across acrylic, watercolor, and now block printing—her recent Hug Series layering carved impressions with painted gesture to express the simple power of connection and touch.
Dan Marsula, whose quiet light anchors this exhibition, paints moments of stillness that feel both familiar and transcendent—a dialogue between solitude and belonging.
Mark Mentzer sees the city and the still life as reflections of one another, distilling the world into a series of repeating shapes that echo human order and rhythm.
Kit Paulsen brings her lifelong love of the outdoors into watercolor landscapes alive with color and memory, each a joyful echo of her early sketches in the Smoky Mountains.
Ron Thurston keeps “one foot in reality,” where movement, light, and abstraction merge into vibrant questions about perception itself—a painter of wonder and intent.

Together, these artists form the exhibition’s true subject: communication made visible. Each mark, motion, and color becomes a small act of reaching out—a collective gesture toward understanding, empathy, and shared beauty.

Exhibition Details

Collective Gestures will be on view at Mark Rengers Gallery from November 1 through December 31, 2025.
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1, 6–8 PM
Holiday Party: Friday, December 5, 6–9 PM

We invite you to join us in celebrating the artists, their gestures, and the shared language that art continues to build between us all.