Red Hook, New York
Group Exhibition
Carbon Life
Duckworth GalleryBettina Magi Veronika Sheer Shura Skaya Carbon Life brings together the work of Bettina Magi, Veronika Sheer, and Shura Skaya in an exhibition that moves through time not as a fixed sequence, but as a shifting field—where past, present, and future overlap, collapse, and re-emerge. Rather than defining “carbon life” through rigid categories, the exhibition approaches it as something felt: unstable, intuitive, and constantly in flux. The works were not made to illustrate a shared concept, yet when gathered, they begin to signal something larger—an underlying condition that resists naming but insists on being experienced. Bettina Magi anchors the exhibition in the past, where memory is not distant but active. Her figures—cowboys, angels, workers—move through symbolic and personal histories shaped by inheritance, belief, and labor. In Factory Girls, her mother appears within the composition, not as a fixed subject, but as part of an ongoing narrative that continues to unfold. Veronika Sheer works in the immediacy of the present. Painting from life, her studies of a living amaryllis unfold without imposed structure, capturing a state of becoming where clarity and dissolution coexist. Each painting holds a moment that is already passing—alive, unstable, and impossible to fully name. Shura Skaya occupies a charged “future present,” where images emerge before they are understood. Her compositions accumulate fragments—figures, gestures, symbols—that feel at once urgent and unresolved. Meaning is not delivered but built over time, as if the work itself is still arriving. Across the exhibition, time behaves like a current: frozen, flowing, and expansive all at once. The past surfaces, the present dissolves, and the future presses forward—sometimes all within a single image. Visitors are invited to move through the exhibition without a prescribed path. There is no correct order, no fixed reading—only the experience of encountering the work in real time, allowing meaning to form, shift, or remain just out of reach. Carbon Life is not an argument. It is an accumulation. “All poetry, no prose.”