On a recent Friday afternoon, the thick, clinging heat of summer followed me into Uffner & Liu gallery. Yet by the time I climbed to the top of the stairs, I felt as if I had entered a cooler, more measured world. There, looking through the steel grid that covers Isabel Horgan’s egg-tempera painting “Mirage” (all works 2026) like a fence’s mesh, I traced a light-speckled route into a lush forest clearing.
In the scene, a solitary figure in a pristine white gown seems to be digging or searching for something just out of sight. The image feels mysterious and fairytale-like, as though it could belong to almost any historical period, except for the gas pipes rising in the foreground. That opening work sets the tone for Marooned.
The exhibition gathers 17 works by the 11 artists in the Rhode Island School of Design’s 2026 Master of Fine Arts in Painting cohort: Lloyd-Princeton Cangé, Callie Coccia, Siran Liu, Kati Lowe, Lucy Luckovich, Banshee Maria, Shiyeon Monk, Pavol Roskovensky, Talha Shams, Ricky Vasan, and Horgan. Their practices span a wide range of interests and visual approaches, from airy, tactile abstractions to glossy, disquieting realism.
Even with that diversity, curator Ajay Kurian found enough common threads in the selected works to bind them into a single, emotionally resonant whole. The result is a presentation that feels both cohesive and varied, forming what he describes as a visually and emotionally rich net.
