Kathleen Vance and Shira Toren at booth #A25
"Carried Ground"
Hidden Landscapes and Material Memory
Artists: Shira Toren and Kathleen Vance
Curated by Daniel Aycock
555 West 57th Street, New York City (between Tenth and Eleventh)
September 23rd, 12pm - 5pm | Collectors First Look + Press Preview
September 23rd, 5pm - 8pm | Opening Night
September 24th - 28th, Noon - 7pm | Public Show DaysVIEW COLLECTION
For SPRING/BREAK 2026, "Carried Ground" brings together the work of Shira Toren and Kathleen Vance in a presentation that explores landscape as something concealed, transported, and remembered. Responding to the theme HIDE N SEEK, both artists investigate how a sense of place can be embedded and imbued into materials, preserved through memory, and reconstructed in their artwork.
Shira Toren's Venetian plaster works are created through processes of layering and removal. The composition and chemistry of her Venetian plaster incorporate pigments and minerals from specific locations, so in this way, her surfaces contain fragments of landscape hidden within their construction. The works function as material records of time and place, where traces emerge gradually through texture, color, and accumulated layers. What initially appears abstract slowly reveals echoes of geological formations, weathered terrain, and sedimentary histories.
Kathleen Vance's "Traveling Landscape" series similarly explore the translation of place, transforming remembered waterways and environments into carefully constructed portable worlds. Housed within vintage luggage and created through an intricate combination of sculptural materials, light, sound, and flowing water, these works blur the boundary between natural landscape and human-made artifact. They suggest the desire to carry, preserve, and reconstruct experiences of place while acknowledging the impossibility of fully controlling and containing nature itself.
Together, Vance and Toren create a dialogue between concealment and discovery. Toren's works hide landscapes within their material structure, while Vance's sculptures present landscapes as constructed fictions that invite close observation and imaginative participation. Both practices ask viewers to seek what lies beneath the surface: geological memory, personal history, and the traces of environments transformed by time and distance.
At SPRING/BREAK, "Carried Ground" presents landscape not as a fixed image but as something continuously shifting between presence and absence, memory and material, reality and representation. The presentation invites viewers into a process of looking, searching, and uncovering, where meaning emerges slowly through sustained attention.
Kathleen Vance Bio
Kathleen Vance is an environmental artist who creates artworks that connect people to local aspects of nature that are overlooked or underappreciated.
Her sculptural installations have been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Orlando Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Peeler Art Center, Shenandoah Museum of Contemporary Art, Hillwood Art Museum, the Weisman Art Museum, Brandywine River Museum of Art, the Bruce Museum, the Albany International Airport, the Center for Contemporary Art Wiesbaden, VOLTA New York, PULSE New York and Miami, Art Cologne, art Karlsruhe, SPRING/BREAK New York, EXPO Chicago and Sotheby’s.
Vance received her B.F.A. from Pratt Institute and her M.F.A. from Hunter College in sculpture. She has received numerous grants and awards for her artwork including: a travel grant to research the geo-thermal regions of Iceland, a grant from the Puffin foundation for public sculpture, a development grant from Aljira, Center for Contemporary Art in conjunction with the Creative Capital Foundation, a grant from the Brooklyn Arts council which aided the development and implementation of an outdoor community based art project in East New York, and a grant from Arts Mid-Hudson for the creation of new environmental sculptural works.
Ms. Vance was artist in resident in Berlin, Germany, presenting a workshop on environmental arts in connection with the Grunewald Parks Department in Germany as well as an artist in resident at the Château de Beaurepaire in the Loire Valley in France. Kathleen Vance has exhibited extensively in New York and internationally and continues to live and work in New York.
Shira Toren Bio
Shira Toren is an American visual artist based in New York City. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an Associate Degree in Art Therapy from The New School, and has studied painting and printmaking at The Art Students League of New York.
Toren’s work explores personal and global themes through the lens of environmental awareness. Her abstract paintings are deeply process-driven, created through a distinctive method she has developed over the years.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in solo, two-person, and group exhibitions at museums and galleries, including Thierry Goldberg Gallery, NYU Gallery, Front Room Gallery, Craven Contemporary, Bernay Fine Art, and Gallery Sitka. She has also participated in The Flag Project, and her artwork appeared in the Prime Video series Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Toren is a recipient of the 2024–2025 Painting Space 122 Project Studio Residency. She lives in SoHo, New York, and works from her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York.