Chance Encounters
March 28 - May 9, 2026

Chance Encounters brings together the work of Chieko Murasugi and Heather Gordon. At first glance, their compositions appear as vibrant, dynamic abstractions, yet each piece is shaped by chance within carefully constructed visual systems. Working with structured frameworks and precise materials—acrylic on panel for Murasugi and oil on canvas for Gordon—both artists balance intuition and method, allowing rhythm, variation, and complexity to emerge over time.

Heather Gordon constructs her paintings and drawings through constraint-based systems that combine mirrored grids, mathematical relationships, and predetermined rules. She establishes compositional fields and then introduces controlled chance operations to shape the distribution and application of color. Working in oil on canvas and ink on paper, Gordon creates layered visual fields where structure and chance interact, allowing balance and complexity to develop over time.

STATEMENT

My work grows out of a long-term investigation into structure, repetition, and the role of chance within tightly defined systems. I build visual frameworks using mirrored grids, mathematical relationships, and predetermined rules that allow complex relationships to emerge from simple constraints. Rather than composing intuitively from a blank surface, I construct environments in which order reveals itself through rhythm, probability, and interaction.

Early projects centered on palindromic forms and symmetrical inversions. Over time, this inquiry shifted toward emergence. This shift focuses on how coherence develops without hierarchy or central control. I establish systems that contain their own internal logic and then allow variation, repetition, and chance to guide each work toward its final form. Across both my paintings and drawings, I am interested in how many parts can exist together without dominance, how balance forms through interaction, and how complexity grows from simple relationships. The work functions less as an image and more as a field. It operates as a distributed structure in which no single element takes precedence.

Materially, I work primarily in oil on canvas for paintings and ink on paper for drawings. These media allow both precision and accumulation, supporting layered systems that unfold slowly over time. A central ongoing question in my practice is how color operates within these structures. It functions not as decoration, but as an emotional and experiential force shaped by adjacency, memory, and perception.

Rather than arriving at a fixed aesthetic, I approach the studio as a site of continual testing and discovery, where structure becomes an environment for lived experience and where order and chance continually shape one another.