Vetri and Traver Gallery are pleased to co-present Northern Light, a two-person exhibition featuring works by Joe Shlichta and Matt Sellars. Opening with a reception on Saturday, May 2 from 3–5pm, this exhibition brings together painting and sculptural carving in a shared investigation of light, perception, and the shifting boundaries between natural and constructed space.
Though working in distinct media, both artists engage with light as an active, elusive force—one that shapes experience while resisting capture. Across the exhibition, light is not only a subject but a material condition: destabilizing form, compressing or expanding space, and heightening the tension between precision and unpredictability.
Matt Sellars’ carved wood sculptures originate in the stark luminosity of West Texas, where intense light flattens distance and sharpens contrast. Drawing from desert landscapes—agave against open sky, eroded rock formations, and remnants of natural processes—Sellars creates forms that hover between organic and architectural. His use of applied color interacts with the wood’s inherent grain, introducing an element of chance that mirrors the forces of erosion and transformation found in nature. The resulting works embody a dynamic tension between machined control and the unpredictable effects of time and environment.
Joe Shlichta’s paintings similarly probe the instability of perception, using color to construct and unravel spatial illusion. Rooted in his background as a theater set painter, Shlichta’s practice reflects an acute awareness of how easily illusion can fracture. His compositions often allude to landscape, yet resist fixed scale or orientation, creating environments that feel both familiar and disquieting. Through layered glazing and expressive impasto, Shlichta explores the emotional and structural power of color—where a single shift in tone can collapse depth or reconfigure space entirely.
Together, Sellars and Shlichta, longtime friends since they were students together at Cornish in 1992, present a dialogue between surface and structure, control and contingency. Northern Light invites viewers to consider how light mediates perception and how material—whether pigment or carved wood—can both reveal and obscure the world it seeks to describe.