SURFACE TENSION

Gray Loft Gallery, August 2026

Spoiler Alert.

In another fine mix of painting, photography and a splash of 3D work, curator Jan Watten at Gray Loft Gallery wraps a summer show about water with a deceptively simple title, Surface Tension.

Naturally this throws us back to a few things: insects that magically skate on a lake; the mystery of what holds bubbles together, and our faces breaking into the air from our strokes under the deep end of a pool. These appreciations all dramatize, although not excitedly, our encounters with water.

But here in the meditative space of the Gallery, the tension is not really between the differing ways that the art works show water or make us think about it. After all, there is little in life that, across so many reasons and occasions, is already so familiar to us as is water.

Nor is the tension due to whether we find one style or scene more engaging than another; one style of portrayal is not better than another. Practically all of the works are both evocative and provocative in some way; each work has a meaning both as memory and as the immediate moment, and intentionally, they do not conflict.

Rather, I think that the tension comes from two other things.

One, nearly all of the 2D works are scenic. We can say about them that - shaped, tangible, and portable - they are containers… they each have carried water from someplace else, numerous slices of reality brought to us here. There is intensity in the selectivity that each artist exerted in deciding what to put into their respective containers. And so there is by definition great specificity on display; yet it is all no less universal. It is the standard modus operandi of variations-on-a-theme, and the arrangement of the works performs a balancing act throughout the exhibit space.

And two, as we continue viewing, it becomes clear that the artists have not simply used light to show the water or its known materiality or its ubiquity. Instead, in these works, when light is seen, the water is the light.

“Water as liquid light…” It’s a thought that subordinates water’s metaphor and memories to its immediate role in creating the image. There is plenty of description going on in the pictures. But as things made and offered by the artist, what is visible in the works is there because the water put it there. Then, in that same moment, the light that is there “reads as” water.

We pick this up directly in Jan Watten’s own piece, as if she had given us all the cheat code to the rest of the show…

Photo: Jan Watten, Reflections - Lake Tahoe

In other pieces, following suit, there is the elegant “brushwork” of Michael Scandling’s ethereal white-on-black photo.

Photo: Michael Scandling. Latourell

Now, far differently, John Wood's colorful hyper-graphic abstraction deftly argues another way that light reads as water in his work. We get it from his title and have an "Aha!" moment.

Looking nothing alike, Wood and Scandling both understand the same thing: once again, water gives light behavior. Consistently, the artist’s rendition has not frozen that behavior; rather, in the art work, water is the light that plays across the surface of the work.

Mixed Media: John Wood, Midafternoon Reflections

In the end, while being indisputably generous with us emotionally, this show is a show about art. The tension is between the stillness of the light in the “container” that is the work, and the dynamism of the artist’s actions that used the water to put the light where it is. Ultimately, these objects celebrate the aesthetic materiality of the subject more than the psychological; and down the road from now that is what I think we will remember distinguishes this show.

[All images above: copyright of their respective artists.]