In Entropic landscapes, Margaret E. Murray, Polly Townsend, and Lisa Kairos examine landscapes shaped by a planet in flux. Through fractured copper plates, distilled land paintings, and layered abstractions shaped by fire, water, and shifting terrain, the exhibition presents landscape as an active system under pressure. From Arctic ice melt to desert erosion and atmospheric change, the works trace how land cracks, recedes, and reorganizes in real time.

Lisa Kairos expands the language of landscape into abstraction. Building her paintings in layers of ink and paint, she draws on geological formations, satellite imagery, water systems, fire scars, and atmospheric transitions. Crisp interruptions in the picture plane suggest shifts in time and perspective, while areas cut away mark the ephemeral nature of our environments. Her compositions hold moments of slippage — where earth becomes sky, burn becomes ash, water overtakes land — resulting in works that feel at once measured and volatile.

Polly Townsend’s paintings approach landscape as a fragile skin — pared back in palette and distilled in form. Returning obsessively to specific terrains, from Death Valley to high-altitude glaciers and remote expanses in Mongolia and Canada, she renders the land as both radiant and vulnerable. Her simplified compositions isolate modest bands of earth, inviting sustained attention. Subtle shifts in light, eroding forms, and retreating snowlines suggest environments under quiet but accelerating pressure.

Margaret E. Murray’s recent work emerges from her time in the High Arctic, where she witnessed firsthand the accelerating melt of polar ice. Her etchings translate glacial rupture into material process: copper plates fissure unpredictably, echoing calving ice sheets and the fracture lines of a warming world. Cracks, tonal shifts, and textured surfaces reflect the shifting relationship between ice and water, solidity and dissolution. The physical act of making mirrors environmental instability, embedding entropy directly into the surface of the work.