In the Light of Endings
Mya Kerner

Opening Reception: Friday, October 2nd, 5–8 PM
Exhibition Dates: October 2nd–31st, 2026

Painted in and around Kerner’s rural Pennsylvania home, the works emerged during a period of personal loss. Moving between light and darkness, growth and decay, Kerner considers landscape as something shaped by shifts in light, season, mood, and circumstance. The exhibition centers on ideas of motherhood, mortality, acceptance, and renewal, finding beauty within the continual cycle of endings and beginnings. 

Working in oil stick on smooth, no-grain poly-cotton canvas, Kerner tapes the unstretched surface directly to walls or Masonite boards, allowing her to work with the immediacy she associates with oil stick on paper. Gestural lines, washes of color, and passages of near-abstraction give way to glimpses of fields, gardens, ponds, and wooded landscapes. The works were created both en plein air and in the studio, often with Kerner’s young daughter and animals beside her. 

Across the exhibition, familiar landscapes shift with season, light, memory, and circumstance. Kerner describes the body and landscape as intertwined: “We were landscape — breathing, growing, falling, fading.” The paintings ultimately locate renewal within that cycle, allowing light to emerge from experiences of loss.