At the center of “Dew Point,” the current exhibition at François Ghebaly, hangs artist Lily Clark’s Inyo (2025), a sculpture of much poetry and power. Clark suspends a large hunk of alabaster from the rafters where water drips from the rock, filling up a steel basin staged below. The drops plunk into the basin, creating unpredictable, meditative ripples flowing in and out and lapping back again on themselves. The basin sits atop a slab of dolomite, both a pedestal and a foundation, but also an opposing force pushing up into the middle of the gallery and, in a sense, the world. Clark may be working with rocks, steel and water, but gravity itself is perhaps the unlikely star of this drama. Viewing Inyo at the buzzy opening in January, I felt much awe, but also a creeping anxiety about the piece, that the cord might snap, plunging the rock into someone’s skull or that the basin would tip over, spilling water all over the gallery floor. Of course, we all trust it won’t, that the bolts and cables fastening Inyo safely in place will hold, that everything will be fine. But that’s just what we tell ourselves about any number of events over which we have little control: floods, earthquakes, fires, the chair we’re sitting on not buckling beneath our weight or the roof above us not caving in over our heads. The list goes on and on and in order to go on living, we ignore an endless array of risks. Yet everyone must face that with enough time, with enough water and enough gravity, we’ll all collapse back into the earth.
Painter Ash Roberts’ triptych Night Pool (2025) frames Clark’s installation in an aquatic, ethereal dreamland. Evoking tidepools and reeds, the work features algae and other fauna floating on the water’s surface. Roberts’ body of paintings are lush and whimsical, their lullaby palettes gentle and calming. I found these works beautiful, and as someone easily enchanted by beauty, I’m inclined to like them a lot. However, in the same way that Clark’s rock and water installations say something moving about the passage of time and transformation, Roberts too is doing more than pleasantly composing with colors, light and forms. The pieces are dreamy to be sure, but like any dream their meanings remain enigmatic, and they slip easily into murkier, darker registers. In the bottom half of the canvases, Roberts’ vegetation and waters grow more vivid, fecund, feral. Reeds clog the lower frames and the algae glimmer with movement. Stuck between land and sea, tidepools are sites of much natural tension, underwater jungles full of animals and plants struggling to survive. They are also subject to the moon’s gravitational pull and this fact deepens and complicates the paintings’ conversation with Clark’s installations. Roberts’ paintings also consider how larger forces, over which we have little control, shape our worlds.
The first show at François Ghebaly curated by the gallery’s assistant director Agathe Pinard, “Dew Point” is layered and quietly provocative. The exhibition presents a natural world full of wonder and mystery, but also one of much indifference. People like to think that on planet earth we’re calling the shots, that we are in control. “Dew Point” suggests that part of what gives life meaning is that we are not.
