Krista Louise Smith and Elliot Purse share a studio in Brooklyn, and a life outside of it. However, their practices could hardly seem more different, and that distance is precisely what this exhibition is about. Smith works on large-scale canvases where color builds up in layers until it inhabits the threshold between abstraction and figuration. Something appears, a sky, a body, a memory, but it never fully takes shape. It is painting that emerges from within: from emotional experience, from femininity, from the weight of memory that the body carries without always knowing why. The figure is never seen; it is sensed.

Purse, by contrast, works with charcoal on paper and leaves nothing to ambiguity. Muscles, mass, the specific gravity of a person in space: his figures are fully and undeniably present, rooted in a tradition of figurative drawing that stretches back centuries. Where Smith dissolves, Purse defines. What connects them is the underlying question: what does it mean to inhabit a body? Both approach it from opposite extremes, she through the most radical abstraction, he through figuration at its most direct, and yet, when placed together in the same space, their works feel like two halves of the same thought.

Parallels does not propose a dialogue between the two artists, but something more honest: coexistence. No formal concessions, no carefully negotiated middle ground. Each remains faithful to their own language, and it is precisely that fidelity, that refusal to yield, that generates the tension sustaining the exhibition. The line between the two worlds is drawn by the viewer.