Night Gallery is thrilled to present Even Odd, an exhibition of new sculptures by Anne Libby. This marks the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery, following See Me So (2021), Earthflash (2018) and Marrow into Moxie (2015-6). Vision is a slippery conjurer. It oozes across surfaces, clinging like a translucent skin to all that enters its line of sight. It spills over, leaks out, seeps beyond the body’s confines, and stretches hungrily outward. Turn inward and the strangeness deepens. Irises form gateways leading to somewhere. What lies beyond their razor-thin threshold of perception? The soul, so they say, mediated in the shimmering membrane of the mirrored self or in the bottomless pit of another’s pupil. And then there’s the gap. That place where things vanish. The smoothed-over void, designed to be forgotten. A blind spot. Missing information fused seamlessly into cohesive illusion. Suspended throughout Anne Libby’s Even Odd, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with Night Gallery, patinated frames arch to rim the perimeter of great cosmic eyes. Wide-open they hover, bifurcated and intersecting. Eyes doubled, staggered, conjoined. Split and flipped at their core, the otherworldly hues foretell an estranged new vision with the site of sight now bent and bizarre. Unified from the center out, a third omnipresent eye manifests and scans panoptically from an omnidirectional view. Libby’s Organelles (all works 2024) evoke the fundamental liminality of life itself. Like their sub-cellular biological counterparts, these half-autonomous, half-dependent demi-organs recall mitosis: the quiet yet radical act of division and regeneration where rupture is not an end but a means of mutation and replication. Dualities of seen and unseen, open and closed, whole and part, singular and multiple, move beyond rigid contrasts. Rather, they function as thresholds, points of transition where distinctions blur and a synthesis comes into focus. Here, opposition is not an endpoint but a prelude to transformation. Through a glass-paned mobile, reflections of stained-glass irises fold into transparency. Flipping between observer and object, the shifting aperture collapses, confusing what’s seen and what’s seeing back. To view is to confront. To see is to be seen, implicated in their unblinking scrutiny. Vision, after all, is never innocent. Split and mirrored, Libby’s orbs hover in this transitory space, spinning out from a centrifugal force that binds inside and outside, like an organ perched at the edge of biology and dream logic where phenomenology distorts into a kind of haunting. Beyond the mechanics of ocular registration, the ancient talisman of the evil eye unwaveringly awaits. More warning or shield than weapon, its wrath only ever reflects the jagged envy of another when a cursed gaze folds back on itself. To look is never passive but always a negotiation of power as it surveils, penetrates, judges. The scrutinizing gaze—whether belonging to a state or corporation, envy or erotics—holds power over its subjects. A selection of contorted window blinds cast in polished aluminum are positioned alongside Libby’s mobiles. Their surfaces invert their function, refracting light instead of blocking; beyond separating to reflect divisions of public and private. Rough glass peepholes puncture the metallic facades of these sculptures. As transparency corrodes the gleaming slats, erosions become intrusions looking through the mirrored partition. —Marie Heilich ____ Night Gallery is delighted to present Supernatural, an exhibition of new oil paintings on canvas by New York-based artist Jane Swavely, marking her inaugural exhibition with the gallery and her Los Angeles debut. Jane Swavely has worked on the Bowery for over forty years, and her views of the New York City sky and Lower Manhattan life permeate her paintings. She’s witnessed gray winters, hazy summers, a fading punk scene, and drunk poets staggering home. These experiences manifest across her canvases as abstract color fields punctuated by jagged, disruptive lines and fragmented borders. The work evokes the tensions and layered histories of the Bowery itself. Swavely translates the city’s energy into luminous paintings, layering dynamic strokes of paint while allowing moments of stillness and light to fracture and recede. In the large-scale painting Supernatural, which gives the show its title, sections of silver, lavender, and pearl jut against each other, creating a force field that is both explosive and contained. The artist credits the quieter elements in her paintings to her time in the Hudson Valley, where she regularly retreats from city life. Across her canvases, reflections of urban and natural concerns collide. Before arriving at her mature style, Swavely made landscape-inspired work. Over the past decade, she’s transitioned to a process grounded in memory, intuition, and precision. Her involvement with A.I.R. Gallery, a women’s artists' collective in New York, played a crucial role during this evolution, supporting her shift from landscape paintings to the more ethereal style she now embraces. The artist describes her practice as “supernatural,” shaped by personal rules and a distinct philosophy. She draws inspiration from American painting histories, bending the concerns of her predecessors to suit her own alchemical approach. She paints directly on canvas atop her studio floor, navigating the work from all angles. Her movements coalesce with the piece's evolving form, influencing its final structure. Swavely’s work is a space of deliberate reduction, where every mark is essential. The artist insists that her paintings are objects, allowing her stretcher bars to push up against the canvas. These skeletal structures remind us that her work is as much about form and material as it is about color and composition. The paintings feel backlit, illuminated from within, like glowing portals—to a specific, memory-laden site, and to a supernatural place far beyond. –Paige Greco