Art League Rhode Island is pleased to present BODIES, an exhibition of recent work by Elected Artists Dan Borden, Erin Starr, and Vincent Wolf, on view from May 9 through June 7, 2026, at the Art League RI Gallery, 80 Fountain Street, Suite 107A, Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
See the work on Artwork Archive.
Bringing together photography, painting, and mixed media, the BODIES exhibition considers the idea of the body in expanded terms: as figure, presence, landscape, psychological space, and material force. Across the artists’ three distinct practices, the exhibition moves beyond literal representation and opens onto questions of identity, vulnerability, environment, distortion, and transformation.
In Dan Borden’s photographs, the body is present but elusive. His shadow-based self-portraits resist the polished logic of the selfie, replacing revelation with ambiguity. These are self-portraits in which the body is not visible, yet insistently remains the focus, pointing to both the impulse to leave a mark and the equally strong impulse to hide. Shaped by light, surface, time of day, and the artist’s position in space, these images present the figure as a temporary interruption—recognizable, but never fully knowable.
Erin Starr’s paintings, from her series Harmonious Landscapes, expand the idea of the body into the natural world. Her work moves through color, texture, and movement to capture the vitality of diverse environments while acknowledging the impact of climate change. By placing extremes side by side—desert and water, heat and cold, arid land and glacial ice—the paintings reflect both the Earth’s resilience and the instability of shifting landscapes. Built through layered materials including acrylic, reflective beads, pumice, fabric paste, ink, and gold leaf, the surfaces reinforce a sense of depth and environmental force.
In Vincent Wolf’s semi-abstract paintings and sculptures, grotesque faces and bodies become charged psychological presences. His heavily worked surfaces and hybrid painterly-sculptural approach create figures that feel at once strange, vulnerable, and confrontational. These character studies suggest fractured narratives and invite viewers to imagine what lies beneath distortion, silence, and unease.
Seen together, the works in BODIES do not offer a fixed definition of embodiment. Instead, they suggest that bodies can be human, symbolic, environmental, remembered, invented, or transformed. The exhibition becomes a space where presence is felt through shadow, texture & color, gesture, and emotional charge.
As Art League RI Elected Artists, Borden, Starr, and Wolf are part of a juried group recognized by the organization for originality, technical skill, conceptual strength, and the development of a distinctive body of work. Art League RI’s Elected Artist program emphasizes not just strong individual works, but cohesive vision and artistic voice.
Art League Rhode Island is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting artists and expanding access to the visual arts through exhibitions, education, and community engagement. ALRI describes itself as a membership-based nonprofit that connects audiences with Rhode Island’s visual arts community and supports artists through exhibitions and public programming.