Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to present Objects of affection, a group exhibit featuring new works by Alaina Enslen, David Halliday, Ash King, Jenny Nelson, and David Sokosh. Through still life and assemblage, created with a range of media, the artists explore the emotive and symbolic qualities of everyday objects. By focusing on both the materiality and deeper meaning behind these subjects, they invite the viewer to reconsider the significance of the ordinary. The show is on view September 26 – November 16, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 27th, 5-7pm. All are welcome to attend.

Cornwall-on-Hudson–based artist Alaina Enslen explores the tension between organic forms and abstract expression through discarded clothing and encaustic monotypes. By fraying, pulling, and cutting fabric apart, she allows it to shed its fixed function and become something raw and expressive. Her encaustic monotypes, made from molten pigmented wax, echoes the earth’s cycles of freezing and thawing, eruption and settling. Each print becomes a record of elemental flux. Enslen layers these materials by fusing them with beeswax and damar resin on birch panel, creating vessels for memory and experience. She is drawn to textiles that evoke personal history or resonate with a collective response. Lately, her palette has shifted to a range of bold earth-tones that, when combined with manipulated strands of thread, highlight a strong understanding of the material’s structure and her passion to collaborate with its spontaneous folds and intricacies. This will mark Enslen’s third exhibit with the gallery.

Jenny Nelson will unveil new charcoal drawings, instilling a new twist in her oeuvre that until recently consisted largely of oil paintings. Using a similar abstract language to her works on canvas, Nelson seeks to get to the root of her painting practice with the series entitled “Drawing Summer”. Three works from the series will be on view, where the artist takes a rare leap into the representational realm, rendering a tabletop still life with zinnias in a greyscale of charcoal against the backdrop of her Woodstock, NY studio. The exhibit will also feature a body of Nelson’s latest paintings and akin to the drawings, they too are based on elements of still life, inviting the viewer to question where observational details end and imagination begins. Compared to earlier work, Nelson opts for stronger forms in deeper palettes, rendered in her quintessential style of expressionistic yet controlled brushwork. The artist has shown with the gallery since meeting Carrie Haddad while studying at Bard College in the early 2000’s. She continues to exhibit nationally and internationally while teaching a very popular online abstract painting course.

David Halliday’s photographs transform everyday objects into quiet meditations on presence and perception. Carefully arranged household items such as bottles, patinaed silverware and watering cans are all captured on medium format film using natural light. In his black and white images, Halliday softens the world into gradients of midtones and flattened perspective, leaving objects to hover like silhouettes between reality and abstraction. In color, the texture and hue speak almost louder than the form. Halliday’s still lifes imbue the ordinary with a strange vitality, as if the objects have absorbed a mood or secret history. The poetry of his visual organization translates not only to his 2D photographs, but to virtually everything he touches. In any event, our curiosity to explore is certainly piqued. David Halliday lives and works in Schodack Landing, NY and has exhibited with the gallery since it opened in 1991. He recently exhibited new work this summer at the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts.

David Sokosh presents a selection of four large scale cyanotype prints from Blueprint of a Collection, a series photographed on site at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. Over the course of two years, the artist explored the extensive holdings of American folk art and objects and photographed artifacts using a large format camera and the 19th century cyanotype printing process with its hallmark blue tones. This collaboration was a natural fit for Sokosh’s obsession with material culture and historical processes. Objects such as weathervanes, goblets, or architectural details are reframed by Sokosh’s keen eye to encourage the viewer to consider it in a new way. Other images are transformed completely to create more abstract patterns. The complete exhibit of 25 images, mixed media constructions, and video presentation is on view at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont through October 26th. David Sokosh lives and works in Claverack, NY.

The gallery is thrilled to present ceramic wall sculpture by Ash King, an interdisciplinary artist based in Troy, NY, who explores the expressive adaptability of clay, emphasizing its ability to shift between fragility and strength, impermanence and durability. Central to the work are interwoven ceramic rings, similar in structure to chainmaille, where each link is singular and delicate yet collectively resilient when unified as a whole. This sculptural language becomes a powerful mediation on connection and isolation, mirroring the human condition and the tension between individuality and collective identity. Through repetition, scale, and metaphor, the work invites viewers to reflect on how we hold ourselves in relation to others, how we navigate belonging, and how even the most fragile bonds become strong when joined in unison.