Novado Gallery presents its next show, “Allegory & Alchemy," featuring artists Debb VanDelinder (still-life scanography printed on aluminum), Riad Miah (abstract paintings that combine scientific exploration that at times, also reference masterworks), and Nathan Sullivan (paintings bound in phenomenology). The show kicks off a dynamic exhibition schedule with this trio artists exhibiting at Novado Gallery for the first time. The works in the show fall within the scope of allegory, (symbolic representation) and alchemy, (a power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way).

Debb VanDelinder is an artist based in Elmira, NY. Known for utilizing a flat bed scanner in her process, Van Delinder has recently stepped up the scale of her digitally created works, which are printed on aluminum. Her lush scanography work has been covered in numerous press publications including: American Art Collector, Santa Fe Reporter, The Buffalo News and is held in collections including St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elmira, NY and Mac World Digital Art Gallery in San Francisco.

VanDelinder’s combinations of subject matter has included flowers, insects, ribbon, fruit, rocks and twine to depict emotions of desire and longing. Through the vanitas-like compositions of the work, Van Delinder’s objects merge unlikely pairings to represent the complexity of relationships and fleeting moments via visual tension.

Riad Miah is an artist and educator who lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, including at the Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, White Box, Mayson Gallery, and Sperone Westwater. He has participated in national and international artist residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten (Belgium) and is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the NY Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) in painting and Germination Europe (Germany).

Miah’s work utilizes spatial systems to create underlying structures and compositions, upon which he then intuitively investigates form and color, while working with the varying properties and of paint and paint mediums. While the work is abstract, the artist pulls inspiration from various sources including: the natural world, poetry, historically important painters such as Ingres, and from music composed by Vivaldi. Viewing these complex, richly layered works by Miah, one may get the sense they are looking into something as vast as the cosmos to microscopic organisms in a petri dish.

Nathan Sullivan lives in Keene, NH and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Franklin Pierce University. His solo exhibitions include shows at Manifest Creative Research Gallery, Furman University, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Southern Oregon University. His work is included in the collections of Purdue University and Syracuse University.

For “Allegory & Alchemy”, Sullivan is exhibiting works from his earlier “Form Series” with his new “Space Series”. In “Form Series," he brings easily overlooked, naturally occurring objects including seed pods, celebrates the importance of their existence by painting them exponentially larger, in chiaroscuro, while the surfaces possess the smoothness of a Vermeer. Sullivan then segues into his “Space Series” landscapes, where he reimagines similar forms’ sources of origin, scale and orientation. Looking at these works, one imagines themselves very small in scale, resulting in a possible roll reversal where things that are normally very small, seemingly unimportant and overlooked, are now looming very large.