An exhibition curated by Michael David

R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction is one of the band’s most enigmatic albums. The title seems to hold several ideas at once rather than one definitive meaning. There is a sense of landscape, memory, history, and the stories we create from the places we have been.

I see some of that same complexity in the work of the artists in this exhibition: Jake Berthot, S. Klitgaard, Patricia Tewes Richards, Sam Shaffer, and Kyle Staver.

For me, the word “reconstruction” is less about rebuilding something that has been physically destroyed and more about the ways we continually remake our understanding of the world. We reconstruct our histories, our identities, our memories, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. We take what has come before and rearrange it, question it, preserve it, discard parts of it, and sometimes discover something entirely new within it.

Painting is particularly suited to this kind of reconstruction.

A painting can begin with an image, a memory, an object, a landscape, a feeling, or simply a mark. From there, the artist begins to build. Things are added and removed. Forms emerge and disappear. Decisions are made, reconsidered, and made again. The surface becomes a record of that process.

The paintings in this exhibition each carry that sense of searching. They are deeply individual, yet they share an understanding that making a painting is rarely a straight line from idea to conclusion. There is room for uncertainty, accident, intuition, memory, and discovery.

Painting creates a shared and intimate space. It can be a place for thinking, remembering, imagining, and sometimes healing. There is something profoundly hopeful in the simple fact that an artist can put something down on a surface with their own hands and leave a record of having been there.

The paintings in this exhibition carry that record.

They also remind us that we are all, in one way or another, constantly reconstructing. Our memories change. Our understanding of ourselves changes and the society we live in and the politics of our times. The meaning of an experience can shift over time. What once seemed fixed can become something else.

Perhaps that is what connects these artists most deeply. Each of them, in very different ways, is making something out of what came before—reworking it, questioning it, remembering it, transforming it, and sometimes simply trying to make sense of it.

These are their fables of reconstruction. And that, to me, is the heart and soul of painting. It is also the heart and soul of every artist who so generously lent their work to this exhibition.

Michael David
Painter, Curator, Educator 

About the Artists:

Jake Berthot (1939–2014) was an American artist whose abstract paintings contained elements of both the minimalist and expressionist styles. During the first 36 years of his career his paintings were entirely non-figurative. His style changed in 1995 when he moved his studio from New York City to a rural community in upstate New York.

Jake Berthot’s work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, among others.

S Klitgaard (b. 1992) is a Brooklyn born and based painter. They got their MFA at Hunter college for painting as well as their BFA from the Maryland College of Art in painting. Staver makes paintings using contemporary mythology mixed with pop culture to explore the idea of having relationships during the end of the world. Primarily painting with acrylic they also make drawings using a tattoo gun on rubber tab, mono prints and watercolors as well.

Patricia Tewes Richards is a painter based between Florida’s Gulf Coast and Kennebunkport, Maine. Her work explores the beauty, vulnerability, and surreal mystery of the natural world through vivid, layered images that blend observation, memory, and magical realism. With a background in biology and medicine, Patricia brings a deep understanding of living systems to her art. Patricia studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio School and earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Patricia is a member of the Yellow Chair Salon, Women Contemporary Artists of Sarasota, National Association of Women Artists, and Art Center Sarasota. Awards include the Mercedes Matter Award from the New York Studio School and she was shortlisted for Jackson’s Art Prize 2025.

Sam Shaffer is originally from Baltimore and based in Philadelphia where he has lived for the past 15 years. His current body of work began with a broken ankle, leading to nine months of drawing and notations. The past three years have been an outpouring of works on paper in all kinds and sizes, taking place in a mystic reality or in his childhood yard. There are creatures and birds, saints and his father—but mostly just the artist, on a journey taken alone to see and feel what exists and where past and present get confused.

Kyle Staver (b. Virginia, MN, US; lives and works in New York, NY, US) is an American painter who also works in relief sculpture, drawing, and etching. Engaging with canonical Western mythological and folkloric traditions, Staver finds her inspiration in sources ranging from the Bible to ancient Greek oral-poetic traditions. Staver earned her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University. In 2015, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, and in 2003, she was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels; Half Gallery, New York; Zürcher Gallery, New York; Galerie RX, Paris; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York; among many others.

Fables of the Reconstruction will be on view at 1GAP Gallery through December 1, 2026.  The gallery is located at 1 Grand Army Plaza, across the street from the Brooklyn Library, a few short blocks from the Brooklyn Art Museum, and easily accessible by subway.

Please make an appointment to view the exhibition. For further information, please email: 1grandarmyplazagallery@gmail.com