Winterhouse Projects Exhibition on Artsy
WINTERHOUSE PROJECTS
ONLINE EXHIBITION ON ARTSY
Midnight in the Garden
June 18 — August 31, 2025
Winterhouse Projects is delighted to present “Midnight in the Garden,” an Artsy exhibition introducing its stable of exceptional artists, with artworks that focus on nocturnal scenes set within nature, mystical worlds that invite us to consider the connection between the environment and ourselves. Throughout these works, there is a theme of liminality, or suspension between states: between nature and culture; night and day; human and animal; fantasy and reality; life and death. Artists Aya Ogasawara, Lillian Day Thorpe, Sandra Allen, Don Freeman, Daniel Tchetchik, and Esteban Urbieta hail from around the world and work in a range of media, including painting, drawing, digital collage, photography, sculpture, and film.
Several of the artists achieve a heightened sense of mystery by depicting landscapes completely devoid of human presence. This is the case in Lillian Day Thorpe’s dreamlike photo collages, which piece together memories of her childhood immersed in Maine’s natural landscape. Her nocturnal depictions of houses among pines or by the sea are bathed in mist and moonlight, yet devoid of human figures. In this way, Thorpe invites the viewer into her mental landscapes—visible but forever out of reach. In a related manner, Don Freeman’s large-scale photographs invite viewers into a world of broken branches, ruins, decaying flowers, and classical perfection. Through an experimental process that combines watercolor, plant pressing, and black and white photography, Freeman suspends these remnants of nature in a world in which time stands still.
Similarly, Sandra Allen employs a technically involved process as a way to freeze nature in time. She photographs, grids, and renders in graphite the trunks of trees at a scale larger-than-life. Allen’s mix of exquisite rendering and stark simplicity evokes a minimalist aesthetic that communicates nature’s profound scale and complexity. In her words, “I love the feeling of working on a piece larger than myself. It makes me realize how small we really are.” Daniel Tchetchik’s photographs are also concerned with our place in the world. His hauntingly beautiful depictions of eroding cliffs, weathered shores, and moonlit seas suggest a brutal world where love is the force that sustains survival. A virtuosic photographer, Tchetchik avoids depicting human figures, instead conveying narrative through natural light, sun flares, grainy textures, and overexposure in his solitary portrayals of sublime natural landscapes.
While these artists completely omit the human figure, others in the exhibition turn their attention to the people and creatures within landscapes, using them as allegories for aspects of our own identities. Aya Ogasawara’s allegorical paintings feature female nudes in symbolic, garden-like settings that echo—but subvert—Old Master traditions. Set against stark black backgrounds that suggest both night and classical drama, the scenes grant agency to their subjects, underscored by titles like Her Lesson and Her Hunting. Sparse clusters of leaves, flowers, insects, and animals serve as symbolic tools in the women’s acts of self-exploration. In a similar vein, Esteban Urbieta’s drawings and paintings draw from his Zapotec heritage, intricately linked to Oaxaca’s natural landscape. His formally-rigorous compositions incorporate recurring symbols—such as birds and deer—against leafy backdrops that transform into intricate patterns. Through this fusion of modernist formalism and natural motifs, his work explores how humans derive beauty and meaning from our environment.
Taken together, the artworks in “Midnight in the Garden” create a space for reflection, guiding viewers into a meditative realm where perception shifts and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Through these nocturnal landscapes, the artists invite us to reconsider the boundaries between nature and ourselves, and to acknowledge both the known and the unknowable within our shared experience.