Nancy Friedland, Heavy Weather, 2023, Acrylic on wood panel, 30 × 40 inches

One by one, each little drop of a story floats upward, dispersing into the low heavy clouds, narrative and chronology, offered and withheld. This is what it feels like to be inside Nancy Friedland’s paintings: a montage of mood pieces, the story told in part, never fully. A recovering photographer, she brings an understanding of light and time: each scene is charged with ephemerality, something has just happened or is about to happen, just outside the frame. The moon, the porch light, the glint of fading sun on a lake, a teardrop without them the darkness spills out forever into the universe, unfettered. Friedland paints the edges of that darkness, giving shape to night; a bulwark against it.