Ebb & Flow: The Many Faces of Water
Heather Stivison’s solo exhibition at New York’s Pleiades Gallery includes original music
September 2-27, 2025
In this her third New York City solo exhibition, Heather Stivison explores the intersection of environmental science and visual art in immersive paintings of the ocean. Her latest exhibition, Ebb & Flow: The Many Faces of Water opens on September 2 at Pleiades Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 304. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 12-6 p.m.
Some of the paintings on view are the result of Stivison’s multi-year, grant funded collaboration with Noah Germolus, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who was researching ocean chemistry. This collaboration led to a unique special feature of this exhibition. After Stivison interpreted his data in paint, he in turn, interpreted four of her paintings in music. The exhibition includes an on-demand sound installation of original jazz music composed and performed by Germolus.
Curator Renee Phillips writes, “Stivison ventures beyond nature’s physical boundaries into abstraction with the profusion of free-flowing biomorphic patterns and tonal ranges. In her paintings the innate attributes of water evolve into metaphors, symbolism and visual poetry.”
The exhibition features a sampling of the many ways Stivison’s oil and acrylic paintings capture the essence of water. Searching for water’s most primary qualities, she uses light, color, form, shape, line, to engender a sense of water. Stivison is fascinated by the reflections and patterns created by the coastal ocean surface. She paints variations on patterns, exploring how much she can change them and still maintain the sense that the subject is surface water. Other paintings explore chemical mysteries within specific ocean zones of exploration. A massive 110-inch quadriptych offers a sense of weightlessness and mystery that she finds in the unknown ocean depths. F
Independent curator Kathy Imlay writes, “Stivison’s paintings have a luminous glow—accomplished by the artist building up layer upon layer of viscous paint, which she pours, smears, scrapes and otherwise manipulates to create fields of color that conjure the watery depths of the ocean or intergalactic space, depending on the palette.”
Heather Stivison is an award-winning artist who has exhibited from coast to coast in the United States and in juried shows in Asia and Europe. For more information about the artist and her work, visit https://www.heatherstivisonart.com/.
