September 20 - October 23, 2026
Joseph O’Neal- Public Libraries | Aneta Wlodyka- What Has My Painting Seen? | James Prez | Olaf Saaf
CLOSING RECEPTION, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2026, 3:30-6:30pm
WAITING ROOM
Joseph O’Neal- Public Libraries
In Public Libraries, Joseph O’Neal continues his exploration of figure and ground through color and form, alongside his use of words and literary references.There is a kind of vibrancy or static between the non-objective forms and text. Words, particularly names and dates, act as an anchor, while color and form remain suspended. In that tension, another kind of reading becomes possible, shaped by the viewer’s own knowledge, memory, and experience.The work is less interested in what is seen than in what looking can set in motion.
Joseph O’Neal (b.1983, North Carolina) paints non-objective imagery in conjunction with words, names, and dates, creating ambiguous fields of possibility. Living and working in Easton, Pennsylvania, O’Neal has participated in group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Mexico.
AL’S OFFICE
Aneta Wlodyka- What Has My Painting Seen?
Aneta Wlodyka creates paintings and installations in dialogue with architecture and the spaces they inhabit. Through pigment, reduction, and material restraint, her work explores emotional presence and gives material form to what would otherwise remain invisible.
Aneta Wlodyka is a Polish American artist based in Ohio. She received her MFA in Painting from the University of the Arts Poznań in Poland in 1992. Her work has been exhibited across Europe and the United States. In 2025, she participated in the RAMA Studios Artist-in-Residence Program in Maceira, Portugal, where she presented her solo exhibition, Presence. Her recent group exhibitions include Shoreline of Geometry at the Sandusky Cultural Center (2026), Falling Faintly Falling at Finch Gallery in London (2025), and Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose at 57west57arts in New York (2025). Her work is in private collections.
MELANIE’S OFFICE
James Prez
There’s a productive tension at work between the gravity of the book-object — bound, authored, presumably important — and the unbothered looseness of the painting sitting on top of it. The fish don’t defer to their surroundings. Bulging eyes, speckled bellies, and grins rendered in a deliberately untrained hand, they treat the page as flotation device rather than foundation, undermining the book’s claim to authority with nothing more than confident color and a wobbly line.
This is appropriation without reverence: literature as raw material, salvage as gesture. The work asks what happens when you stop reading and start looking — when a book, no longer required to make sense, is simply allowed to hold something beautiful and a little absurd on its surface. The result sits somewhere between illustration, collage, and quiet vandalism, refusing to resolve into any one of them.
Thirty fish, cut from cardboard boxes and painted with the confident wobble of a hand that never went to art school (on purpose). Bulging eyes, gap-toothed grins, and scales rendered in whatever color felt right that day — these are not field guide illustrations. They are opinions.
Each fish swims across a bed of found paper: sheet music, old textbook pages, ornamental scraps rescued from books no one was reading anymore. History gets recycled into habitat. The fish don’t seem to mind.
James Prez has been living and working in Brooklyn since 1995.
SHELF & AL’S OFFICE
Olaf Saaf
My wooden guys are carved mostly from pine and basswood and painted with enamel. This year I started working as a violin restorer, and the techniques I’ve learned at this job have informed my carving process a lot. I’ve made a few sculptures here to pay tribute to the histories of instrument making. In all of my work I try to use color with intention, and I try to view each piece more as an abstraction when adding color.
Olaf Saaf is a sculptor and painter from southern Vermont, currently currently based in Los Angeles. He studied painting at Sarah Lawrence College, where he also began making wood carvings. He has shown his work at The Kent Museum in Calais VT, and PULP in Holyoke MA.
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