Stratified

Stratified brings together the work of Ginny O’Brien and Linda Coppola, two artists whose works are built through accumulation, where images develop through change, revision, and discovery.

The idea of layering extends beyond the physical construction of the artwork. Both artists are in the later chapters of their lives, and their works reflect the richness that comes from having lived through many experiences. Over time, life itself accumulates in layers: relationships, memories, places, discoveries, losses, joys, changes, and observations. Each new experience becomes another layer, adding depth to the person, and to the artist. Nothing exists in isolation. What came before continues to shape what comes next.

Ginny O’Brien works between painting and textile, transforming fabric through dye, paint, collage, and texture. Her compositions evolve through accumulation, as color, material, and gesture are added, obscured, and reworked. A recurring elevated perspective draws from her longstanding connection to nature and memories of flying with her father in his airplane, transforming remembered places into fields of color, movement, and texture. Works such as Spreading Green, Bird’s Eye View from Dad’s Cessna-1, Bird’s Eye View-2, and Ouray, Colorado at High Noon suggest natural phenomena without becoming literal representations. O’Brien allows observation, memory, and intuition to build upon one another. In her work, each layer is continually unfolding to reveal another story through material and memory.

Linda Coppola’s practice is rooted in the language of relationships, connecting people, generations, and the natural world. Her process begins with cutting. In her studio, fragments are organized in boxes with playful names like Negative Space, Figurative Fodder, and Decidedly Spiritual. Pieces that might otherwise be discarded become the beginnings of something new. Figures return throughout her work, traced, altered, and reimagined, developing new personalities and relationships over time. A fragment from one work can become the foundation for another. Her paintings contain a private visual vocabulary of recurring faces, eyes, embryos, doors, figures, and abstracted words. Asemic writing forms a kind of hidden skeleton within the paintings, suggesting language without resolving into literal meaning and inviting viewers to search for connections beneath the surface. Recently, her work has turned more deliberately toward nature and spirituality, with animals, flowers, and organic forms appearing in lighter, sweeter compositions. This shift reflects a desire to turn toward beauty, healing, and connection in response to the darkness of the world through an intuitive choosing of light. In Coppola’s work, layers accumulate not only as material but as memory, relationship, symbolism, and possibility.

The exhibition ultimately suggests that an artwork, like a stratum or a life, is never one thing. In the work of Ginny O’Brien and Linda Coppola, it is built from layers, some visible, some concealed; some deliberate, others intuitive, each contributing to the complex surface we encounter in the present.